Photo project: Slate wants you to shoot the recession

This photograph of a shop window in San Francisco was submitted into Slate's Flickr photo pool. (Source: balmes on Flickr)

BY: INYOUNG HWANG – MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Slate is turning to its readers for photographs that capture the current recession.

The online magazine has created a picture group called “Slate’s Shoot the Recession Project” on Flickr, where participants can submit images that they believe are emblematic of the ongoing economic crisis:

Grim economic times produce indelible images. The Great Depression calls to mind grainy news photos of bank runs and soup kitchens, and the harrowing portraits taken by Walker Evans. The downturn of the 1970s evokes images of yacht-size cars idling in line at the gas station. But what does the current economic crisis look like?

Of course, the first images that pop into mind of the current downturn are of shops going out of business and empty, foreclosed homes that are by-products of the housing crisis. But Slate says it hopes participants will use their imaginations to take photographs that illustrate the crisis without stating the obvious. I’m really curious to see what the images of Chicago and the Midwest in a recession will look like – perhaps shut down factories, crowded ‘L’ trains and abandoned spaces in the Loop?

Slate refers readers to a recent Boston Globle essay that posed the question “Depression 2009: What would it look like?” in which the writer Drake Bennett observed that “instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.”

Slate points out that “you can’t take a photograph of a collateralized debt obligation.” But so far, there are 118 images in the Flickr photo pool and some of them are quite good – much more moving than a CDO could ever be.

So bring out your camera and snap some photos. As Walker Evans demonstrated, great art and creativity can develop from especially hard times.

This photograph in Slate's Flickr pool shows a father and son in Los Angeles discussing college tuition costs. (Source: SeeingBeing on Flickr)

Tags: Flickr, photography, recession, Slate, Walker Evans