photo essay about poverty

A Fierce and Tender Eye: Gordon Parks on Poverty’s Dire Toll

Original caption: "In the shadowy slum world into which she was born in Rio de Janeiro, 3-year old Isabel da Silva cries to herself after vainly seeking comfort from her exhausted father, Jose."

Original caption: “In the shadowy slum world into which she was born in Rio de Janeiro, 3-year old Isabel da Silva cries to herself after vainly seeking comfort from her exhausted father, Jose.”

Gordon Parks

Written By: Ben Cosgrove

In June 1961, LIFE magazine published a story that, at the time, was astonishing not only for its unflinching coverage of abject poverty, but for the tender and fierce way that photographer Gordon Parks chronicled lives crushed and twisted beneath that poverty’s relentless pressure.

That the story focused on poverty in Latin America and, through Parks’ lens, focused on poverty in one family in one favela , or shantytown, in Rio de Janeiro added a global as well as a deeply human dimension to a story that few American publications of the era could have envisioned, much less pursued.

The story that ran in LIFE, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” was remarkable for a variety of reasons, not least of them Parks’ intimate portraits of the family of Jose and Nair da Silva and their eight children, ranging in age from 12 years to 17 months old. LIFE showed its readers a frightening, brutal world where the da Silva children and, by implication, countless others like them spent their days “penned in their shack [built of tin cans and broken orange crates] or roaming the foul pathways of the favela where the filth of the inhabitants is tossed out to rot.”

At the center of the story was the eldest da Silva son, 12-year-old Flavio; after his father was hurt and could not work, the burden of caring for the entire family landed on Flavio. His struggle to keep the family afloat, even while he himself was sick and getting sicker is tortuously clear in Park’s photos.

Here, LIFE.com republishes all of Park’s photos from “Freedom’s Fearful Foe,” while also offering a special appreciation of Parks by his friend, Barbara Baker Burrows (see below).

Parks himself was a remarkable, inspiring creative force a man whose protean talents were neatly summed up in the indispensable book, The Great LIFE Photographers :

Something mighty there is inside a man that takes him from being the youngest of 15 children raised in Kansas poverty, something that lets him clear the cruel hurdles implanted by a racist society, something that permits not merely survival but mastery of all that he embraced. A poet, and a pianist, a classical music composer, and one very at home with the blues . . . a journalist, a novelist and a man with enough life that even three autobiographies cannot contain the whole, a painter of oils and water colors, and a photographer of street gangs and Paris boulevards . . . It is not simply that he was the first black man to do all these things, but that any man was able to do all these things and do them well.

“The anguish which poverty inflicts,” LIFE observed in 1961, “is cruel and varied — statistics cannot convey its accumulated torments and degradations. But poverty always has a human face.” Throughout his life, Gordon Parks sought to put a human face on the grand currents of history, as well as on quieter, more intimate, and often more revelatory moments.

The Flavio story, in particular, always held a special resonance for Parks, as Barbara Baker Burrows explained to LIFE.com:

So often, late at night, his piano momentarily silent, Gordon’s already tranquil mood would turn reflective. It was perhaps not unexpected for a man of so many accomplishments who had reminisced in several books about the experiences of his life and the lessons he drew from them. Books and photographs and honors were everywhere, and through the sweet smoke of his pipe, the conversation would turn to Flavio.

He had spotted Flavio da Silva carrying water on his head, climbing the steep hills of one of Rio’s favela s to the shack where, for six days a week, while his mother worked, he cared for his brothers and sisters. Gordon had followed him home and his 1961 essay focused on the 12-year-old Brazilian boy to personalize the story of South America’s deplorable poverty.

In one bed, five of the da Silva’s eight children slept with their parents. In the favela , only one child in four attended any kind of school. And for Flavio, the day’s responsibilities began at dawn despite the bronchial asthma and malnutrition he suffered.

Gordon suspected tuberculosis. “I am not afraid of death,” Flavio told him. “But what will they do after?”

Gordon was careful to ensure that his own presence affected the story as little as possible. He wrestled with the temptation to take food to the struggling family; on occasion, so as not to offend them , he shared the dried beans, rice and stale bread they offered him. Some nights he slept on the floor of the family’s shack.

Although the children lived ten minutes from one of the world’s most famous beaches, they had never set foot on it.

It was one of those stories that truly reached LIFE’s readers, and contributions poured in. A hospital in Denver offered to treat Flavio, and he received two years of treatment from doctors there. In Rio, the family moved into a new house. But, so as not to make just one family rich, the money was used to benefit the whole favela , it bought a drainage system and much more. A decade later the last of it helped to set up a medical clinic.

Flavio survived, and Gordon would look back on their time together as “some of the most tender moments of my life.”

“You provided me with a message to give to the rest of the world,” he told Flavio, “one that I felt was perhaps the most important message I’ve ever delivered, about caring, about love, and about how one who is close to death has the courage to hold on and encourage other people to live.”

In 2000, for the last issue of the monthly LIFE, I was able to assign Gordon to photograph Flavio again, now over fifty and with a family of his own. Gordon had never stopped taking care of him; he felt that he had received as much from Flavio as he had given.

As I wrote at the time of his death: “Gordon had decades of accomplishment, but he was not finished.” The story of Flavio was just one story, albeit one with special meaning, in his life as a photographer, itself one career in a life of many. Often, his subjects had become a lifetime’s obligation, or as he put it: “I wound up being an objective reporter with a subjective heart.”

Barbara Baker Burrows  has been associated with LIFE for more than 45 years, assigning and coordinating photography for major events from coverage of the Apollo space program to political conventions and the Olympics. Among the books she has edited are the New York Times best seller, One Nation, America Remembers September 11, 2001 , photographic biographies ( The American Journey of Barack Obama ; Bob Dylan, Forever Young ) and Titanic . Bobbi lives in Manhattan with her husband, Russell. They have two children, James and Sarah.

Original caption: “In the shadowy slum world into which she was born in Rio de Janeiro, 3-year old Isabel da Silva cries to herself after vainly seeking comfort from her exhausted father, Jose.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “Straining up hill, with Luzia, 6, and Isabel, 3, following, Nair da Silva balances three gallons of water on head.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “On filth-strewn paths Mario da Silva, 8, howls after being bitten by neighbor’s dog.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “Home for da Silva family is hillside jumble of squatters’ huts beneath Rio’s famous statue of Christ.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “The baby, Zacaria, 1, explores the path leading beneath the pilings which support shack.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “The family’s day begins at dawn. In the biggest room of the shack,6 by 10 feet, 12-year-old Flavio gets himself up. While the rest of the family sleep — the parents and five children in one bed, the other two in the crib — Flavio puts a tin can of water on the fire and throws in some coffee. Sometimes there is hard bread to put in it. For them all, including the baby, that is breakfast.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “In constant struggle to keep the shack in order, Flavio tries to arrange covers of family bed. There are no sheets or pillows.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “Pouring water into family’s cooking pot, Flavio starts meal for brothers and sisters. Flavio says, ‘Some day I want to live in a real house, on a real street, with pots and pans and a bed with sheets.'” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “A boy burdened with a family’s cares.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “Dead neighbor of Da Silvas lies with vigil candles awaiting burial. Pillow for her head and linen sheets used for shrouds are amenities few favelados receive in life. When Gordon Parks asked one favelado about his six children, he replied, ‘There were nine. The other three are with God. He was good enough to take them.'” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “Sick and exhausted from week’s care of the family, Flavio rests on Sunday when his mother is free to look after brothers and sisters. ‘I am not afraid of death,’ he explained earnestly to Parks. ‘But what will they do after?'” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “At Copacabana Beach where Gordon Parks took them, Mario and Flavio play in sand. The beach is only 10 minutes from their home but neither had ever visited it.” Gordon Parks

Original caption: “In the favela , Parks carries baby Zacarias up the hill to the shack to be cleaned up.” Gordon Parks

LIFE magazine, June 16, 1961 Gordon Parks for LIFE Magazine

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Photo essay: Equality is our goal, access is our right

Date: 01 March 2019

A bus to get to work. A clinic for health care. A monthly pension for old age. Some people can take these for granted. But many others suffer from the lack of infrastructure, public services and social protection that affect their rights and well-being. Women and girls are often foremost among those who miss out.

Progress and real development will only be possible if all people have equal rights and opportunities to thrive. Meeting that goal requires recognizing that women and girls face particular barriers and have different needs. And then taking deliberate steps so that no woman or girl is left behind, regardless of where she lives or how much she earns, or where she comes from.

Infrastructure can provide a way out of poverty and increase the chance of a better future. When there is a lack of infrastructure, communities around the world depend on women to close the gaps with their time-consuming, back-breaking labour.

“I leave home by 7 a.m. to come here by bike. I work until 1 p.m. If there’s no bike to take me back, I walk back home. It can take 2 – 3 hours and I am usually very tired by then. Because of the distance, I cannot carry anything if I am walking back,” says Mohn Malambi, a member of SOCCOMAD, a newly formed women’s cooperative in Yoko, central Cameroon.

Women in this community have grown food for generations but didn’t have land right or access to markets to sell the food they grew. Three years ago, the Government of Cameroon started to build a 250 Km (155 mile) road that would connect rural communities like Yoko with the capital. The women farmers of Yoko seized their moment to start a cooperative, knowing that the road project would bring more people to the area and create access to larger markets for their produce.

“The cassava crop cannot be left in the ground too long, because it rots,” says 52-year-old Tukuri Marie Chantal. It’s a simple equation—with land ownership and better roads, it takes less time and costs less to transport produce, and that means more income for women farmers.

The city of Jakarta, Indonesia, gleams with new buildings and other amenities. Yet safety in public spaces is a concern for women there. Fears about harassment and assault may keep women from using urban transport and other infrastructure even if they have ready access to it. Measures such as bright lighting and visible passageways help alleviate their concerns. With UN Women’s support, the Safe Jakarta project is aimed at pinpointing and closing safety gaps.

In disaster-prone Fiji, recovery efforts after Tropical Cyclone Winston had to involve women, especially the women vendors of Rakiraki Market. “For most of us women market vendors, we focus only on coming to the market to make money. But what if there is a cyclone or flooding that makes it impossible for us to be in the market?” says Varanisese Maisamoa, President of the Rakiraki Market Vendors Association.

The women vendors’ insights informed the market reconstruction to include Category-5 cyclone resilient infrastructure, a rain water harvesting system, flood resistant drainage, and a gender-responsive design.

“I’m looking forward to a market that is safer, better ventilated, with facilities such as changing areas for babies, improved toilets and a female market attendant. Our vendors also know what to do before, during and after a disaster,” Maisamoa added . Read more ►

Communities without electrical grids are increasingly turning to solar devices to jumpstart access to modern energy. Martha Benavente learned to make simple, low-cost solar lamps through a programme supported by UN Women and the governments of Norway and Sweden in a small community in Guatemala. Selling the lamps provides a source of income. Using them in her own home has ended the days when she would race to finish chores before dark because it was too costly to burn candles. Read Martha’s full story ►

Education is a human right and an essential public service with lifelong consequences. Yet many girls still struggle to get an education. In Khayelitsha, the largest informal township in Cape Town, South Africa, girls at the Yomelela Primary School contend with severe poverty and acute risks of violence. With the backing of the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, sports and peer counselling are among the methods that help them cope, feel safe and stay in school.

As the fourth industrial revolution unfolds, the future of jobs will be defined by innovation. While more girls are attending school than before, girls are significantly under-represented in STEM subjects in many settings. The first Coding Camp in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, brought together girls from 34 countries in the African continent to nurture their potential as innovators and technology creators. 

What happens when girls get equal access to technology? They build.

“We are trying to build a drone that is controlled by SMS messaging that will be able to dispense medicine in rural areas,” shared 15-year-old participant Eno Ekanem. Read more ►

In the Republic of North Macedonia, many girls and boys with disabilities are still segregated in separate schools; a very low percentage reach university. Activist Elena Kochovska is fighting for their greater inclusion in education and employment. Read her full story ►

Health-care services should reach all women and provide all the services they need. Yet, too many women still die giving birth, especially in poorer countries where services may be limited and poor in quality. With 1,072 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births, Liberia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. In the remote areas, infrastructure and facilities in clinics are often lacking; midwives and health-care workers have to deliver babies without any electricity at night.

“It’s really challenging to assist with a delivery using my phone’s light, because I can’t see clearly. I have to hold the phone in my mouth while working. Doing [medical] procedures at night is almost impossible,” explains midwife Lorina Karway.

A UN joint programme installed solar lighting systems in 26 health centres and in five maternal waiting rooms in rural Liberia, including the Bodowhea Clinic, where Karway works, to improve maternal and child health-care services. Read more ►

Low-cost, readily accessible legal aid upholds the rights of poorer women, in particular, to obtain justice as well as essential public services. In Kazakhstan, UN Women has trained legal advocates like Natalia Minayeva. They help women living with HIV solve legal issues and find social assistance, including to end drug dependency. Read more ►

Green, open spaces where everyone can convene, relax and take a break may be taken for granted in some parts of the world. For women and girls in Al-Shoka, a conflict affected neighbourhood in Gaza, Palestine, this was a distant dream, until now. In 2018, the only public garden in Al-Shoka, which was destroyed by the conflict, opened to the public. What’s more, it was re-designed by three female architects and a group of young people from the community to be a truly inclusive space. Read about the female architects who redesigned the garden ►

Limited access to childcare remains a major barrier for women seeking paid jobs, underscoring the importance of providing quality public childcare. Time-use surveys in Uruguay revealed that women spent two-third of their week doing unpaid work, and only one-third on paid work. For men, the reverse applied. The data made Uruguay rethink “care” as an issue that impacts the society and ultimately, led to the adoption of a new law in 2015. Under the Care Act (No. 19,353), all children, persons with disabilities and elderly persons, have the right to get care. The State not only provides care services now, but also guarantees their quality by providing training and regulations.

Soledad Rotella is one of the many mothers benefiting from the new law. Since quality and free day care is available for her 2-year-old daughter, Kiara Rotella can get a full-time job without risking the wellbeing of her daughter. Read the full story ►

Longer, healthier lives are now the norm in many countries, an indisputable sign of progress. By 2030, over 16 per cent of people will be over age 60, compared to just over 8 percent in 1970. Pension systems are expanding to support people in old age. Yet women are less likely to be covered and generally receive less than men, even as they live longer on average. In Viet Nam, Phung Thi Vinh spent a lifetime as a primary school teacher but only began contributing to social insurance late in her career. A government programme helped her catch up. “My pensions payments are small,” she says. “But they help keep body and soul together.”

This photo essay has been adapted from a UN Women photo exhibition at the UN Headquarters in New York, running from 7 March - 27 March

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Depicting Poverty: Matt Black Pushes Documentary Photography to its Fullest Range

We know what poverty looks like: unpainted boards, empty windows and door frames, broken roofing. Or it could be sagging fences and telephone poles, or cracked pavement and graffiti-stained concrete walls. Or faded billboards and backlot signage with their ironic injunctions to “dream” or “save.” Or worn faces and bodies scarred by years of hard labor, want, and worry. Such stark, black and white images of abandonment and desolation have become the iconography of documentary photography. They also were a genuine artistic achievement and a major contribution to public life. If you doubt that, consider what it would have been to see only the sunny faces, gleaming suburbs, and beautiful vistas of commercial advertising.

Yet, as with all black and white photography, the documentary images now can seem antique. They evoke an earlier time and a different sense of community: tenements and unions, the dust bowl and the New Deal, Life magazine photo-essays and LBJ’s War on Poverty. One could imagine that by bringing unseen miseries to light, others would respond so that, someday, such photographs would be unnecessary—or even impossible.

That day has yet to come. Photographers still are laboring to expose poverty, which in the US now is getting worse, not better. Poverty rates are rising while it also is becoming more widespread and more persistent. Most important, perhaps, too many in the society and among its so-called leadership are less and less likely to see poverty as their problem, as something affecting their community.

What, then, should a photographer do?  Scrap the conventions that served so well in the past—say, to use the color that saturates everyday photography and thus risk superficiality, or to experiment for an audience that doesn’t often reward artistic innovation? Keep recycling the same images in the hope that persistence and some nuance of artistry or change in distribution can make a difference? Or work within the documentary conventions while also developing photography’s overlooked capacities as a medium?

Enter Matt Black , who has been doing really good work to document poverty in the US today. Note that I did not say “compelling” work or “powerful” work; frankly, I am sadly skeptical about the persuasive capacity of documentary photography today, and not because of the photographers. Even if the work does not persuade as it should, however, we need not let the venality and cowardice dominating politics and news media today keep us from learning. And Black has something to teach.

The first lesson comes from his commitment to black and white. Because he also hews so closely to the formal compositions, precise tonalities, and other artistic conventions of the documentary tradition, the resonance with the past is palpable yet without a hint of nostalgia.

And because the point is the subject, rather than the artistry, the implication becomes clear: what should be past is still present.

The fact that poverty looks the same is due not to artistic complacency, but rather the failure of a modern society to achieve its own goals. Although the images do capture specific circumstances of the present, it becomes clear that the names may change while the system remains the same. His use of full range of the classic iconography—for example, the portrait above—does what it always did: communicate the dignity of the individual person while showing how it was sapped by the real conditions of their existence. The hard truth, however, is that people continue to struggle with scarcities that can at best be described as artificial.

No wonder his major project is labeled “ The Geography of Poverty .” Systemic, widespread, endemic: he is not focusing on personal stories or individual virtues and vices; he is mapping how poverty is a major problem today, now, this minute and every minute. Doing so takes any photographer to the edge of the medium: how can the camera depict markets and other networks of distribution?

Photography is an archive of fragments, a museum of particularity: single moments in specific places. It shows what was there, then, but not how something can be elsewhere or everywhere. For that, we are told by critics of the medium, one has to turn to writing and to other arts more capable of abstraction.

It is precisely in addressing this predicament that Black excels.

Many of the photographs feature patterns and some are works of abstract art. They have actual referents, of course—power lines, fencing, oil stains—but that is the lesser point. Nor are we being invited to a guessing game, or to admire the artistry, or to conclude that there is beauty even in dire circumstances.

The abstraction is front and center, and it is featured as a normal property of photography. As if one might say: “of course, this is another image of poverty; can’t you see?” Because it is an image of poverty, and these are the second and third lessons: poverty is a system, and its persistence depends on abstraction. There are patterns of deprivation that can be seen. There is a geography to poverty: across the country and in every city and town. It is systemic. And there are patterns that extend indifference. Poverty persists in part because we think of it too often in terms of abstractions: the economy, the poor, market solutions, the working poor, supply and demand, those people. . . .

Because poverty is systemic, it has to be addressed in terms that implicate and obligate the society as a whole. Because it depends on processes of denial that employ abstractions, we have to learn to see it even in abstract images. These several contributions come together in Black’s photographs of found patterns or accidental artworks.

These images also are material records of the daily catastrophes that become bound together in poverty.

The abstraction makes an argument that might be lost in accounts of the particular incidents. There always will be social problems, but it should not be easy to take a photograph of shattered glass at long-shuttered factories, or blood-stained walls, or criss-crossed power lines, or defaced blackboards, or towns that are much too empty.

By creating images that could double as works of fine art, Black challenges a system of public indifference. These are images that should not be possible, or at least not necessary, but here they are, today, showing what is happening everywhere. By drawing on photography’s capacity for abstraction, which also is often unseen, Matt Black is able to confront a system of persistent and unnecessary violence.

-Robert Hariman

Photos: Matt Black/Magnum Photos  Caption:  Hosmer, SD. Empty farmhouse. Hosmer is a town in Edmunds County, South Dakota. The population is 208 and 28.2% live below the poverty level;   Caption 2 : Flint, MI. Tim Monahan caught Legionnaires’ disease in June 2014, two months after the city switched to Flint River water. 91 cases of Legionnaires’ have been reported so far, with twelve deaths. “For all intents and purposes, they are getting away with murder,” he said.; Caption 3 : Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. Broken utility wires.; Caption: 4 ; Reading, PA. Shuttered factory. Reading is a city in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The population is 88,082 and 38.7% live below the poverty level. 

Robert Hariman See other posts by Robert here.

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The Geography of Poverty

"Marginalized" originally referred to what fell beyond maps of the Roman Empire, but today the word has a different meaning. To be on the edges of the known world today means that your air and water are likely polluted, your roads are in poor condition, your food and medical care are inferior. Poverty is a relative calculation, but it has concrete outcomes: life expectancy, health, education—all are shaped by money and place.

Today, over 45 million people qualify as poor in the U.S., the largest number seen in the 50 years for which poverty data have been published, earning less than $11,490 annual income for one person or $23,550 for a family of four. At the same time, the share of income going to the top one percent of the population has doubled, rising from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011. At the very top, the richest 0.1 percent's share of the national wealth has tripled.

Income inequality in the U.S. is now on par with Cameroon, Mexico, and China, and nowhere is the country's line between rich and poor as sharp as in California's Central Valley, the rural, agricultural area where I live. Here, in the heart of the richest state, conditions rival that of any third world nation, with residents suffering some of the country's highest unemployment and hunger rates. This project, combining images, geolocation, and poverty data, seeks to put these marginalized communities on the map, charting this unseen geography of poverty.

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Modernisms 1900-1980

Course: modernisms 1900-1980   >   unit 9.

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How Photographs of Poverty in the Americas Ignited an International Battle over Propaganda

Origins and Evolution of O Cruzeiro

Photographer henri ballot and his side of the flávio story, ballot takes on poverty in the united states, a battle in print—with real consequences, additional resources:, want to join the conversation.

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390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

• 📑 Aspects to Cover in a Poverty Essay

Students who learn economics, politics, and social sciences are often required to write a poverty essay as part of their course. While everyone understands the importance of this topic, it can be hard to decide what to write about. Read this post to find out the aspects that you should cover in your essay on poverty.

🏆 Best Poverty Topics & Free Essay Examples

👍 powerful topics on poverty and inequality, 🎓 simple & easy topics related to poverty, 📌 interesting poverty essay examples, ⭐ strong poverty-related topics, 🥇 unique poverty topics for argumentative essay, ❓ research questions about poverty.

Topics related to poverty and inequality might seem too broad. There are so many facts, factors, and aspects you should take into consideration. However, we all know that narrowing down a topic is one of the crucial steps when working on an outline and thesis statement. You should be specific enough to select the right arguments for your argumentative essay or dissertation. Below, you will find some aspects to include in your poverty essay.

Poverty Statistics

First of all, it would be beneficial to include some background information on the issue. Statistics on poverty in your country or state can help you to paint a picture of the problem. Look for official reports on poverty and socioeconomic welfare, which can be found on government websites. While you are writing this section, consider the following:

• What is the overall level of poverty in your country or state?
• Has the prevalence of poverty changed over time? If yes, how and why?
• Are there any groups or communities where poverty is more prevalent than in the general population? What are they?

Causes of Poverty

If you look at poverty essay titles, the causes of poverty are a popular theme among students. While some people may think that poverty occurs because people are lazy and don’t want to work hard, the problem is much more important than that. Research books and scholarly journal articles on the subject with these questions in mind:

• Why do some groups of people experience poverty more often than others?
• What are the historical causes of poverty in your country?
• How is poverty related to other social issues, such as discrimination, immigration, and crime?
• How do businesses promote or reduce poverty in the community?

Consequences of Poverty

Many poverty essay examples also consider the consequences of poverty for individuals and communities. This theme is particularly important if you study social sciences or politics. Here are some questions that may give you ideas for this section:

• How is the psychological well-being of individuals affected by poverty?
• How is poverty connected to crime and substance abuse?
• How does poverty affect individuals’ access to high-quality medical care and education?
• What is the relationship between poverty and world hunger?

Government Policies

Governments of most countries have policies in place to reduce poverty and help those in need. In your essay, you may address the policies used in your state or country or compare several different governments in terms of their approaches to poverty. Here is what you should think about:

• What are some examples of legislation aimed at reducing poverty?
• Do laws on minimum wage help to prevent and decrease poverty? Why or why not?
• How do governments help people who are poor to achieve higher levels of social welfare?
• Should governments provide financial assistance to those in need? Why or why not?

Solutions to Poverty

Solutions to poverty are among the most popular poverty essay topics, and you will surely find many sample papers and articles on this subject. This is because poverty is a global issue that must be solved to facilitate social development. Considering these questions in your poverty essay conclusion or main body will help you in getting an A:

• What programs or policies proved to be effective in reducing poverty locally?
• Is there a global solution to poverty that would be equally effective in all countries?
• How can society facilitate the reduction of poverty?
• What solutions would you recommend to decrease and prevent poverty?

Covering a few of these aspects in your essay will help you demonstrate the in-depth understanding and analysis required to earn a high mark. Before you start writing, have a look around our website for more essay titles, tips, and interesting topics!

• Poverty Research Proposal To justify this, the recent and most current statistics from the Census Bureau shows that the level and rate of poverty in USA is increasing, with minority ethnic groups being the most disadvantaged.
• What Causes Poverty in the World One of the major factors that have contributed to poverty in given areas of the world is overpopulation. Environmental degradation in many parts of the world has led to the increase of poverty in the […]
• Poverty: A Sociological Imagination Perspective I was raised in a nuclear family, where my mum was a housewife, and my father worked in a local hog farm as the overall manager.
• Wordsworth’s Vision of Childhood in His Poems “We Are Seven” and “Alice Fell or Poverty” Specifically, the joint publication he released in 1798 known as “Lyrical Ballads” are considered the most important publications in the rise of the Romantic literature in the UK and Europe.
• Max Weber’s Thoughts on Poverty Weber has contributed to the exploration of the origins of poverty and the impact of religions on the attitude to it.
• Poverty in the World In this paper, we will be looking at the situation of poverty in the world, its causes and the efforts of the international organizations to manage the same.
• “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by Peter Singer The article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by author Peter Singer attempts to provide a workable solution to the world poverty problem.
• Consumerism: Affecting Families Living in Poverty in the United States Hence, leading to the arising of consumerism protection acts and policies designed to protect consumers from dishonest sellers and producers, which indicates the high degree of consumer’s ignorance, and hence failure to make decisions of […]
• Analysis of Theodore Dalrymple’s “What Is Poverty?” With ethical arguments from Burnor, it can be argued that Dalrymple’s statements are shallow and based on his values and not the experience of those he is judging.
• Relationship Between Crime Rates and Poverty This shows that the strength of the relationship between the crime index and people living below the line of poverty is.427.
• Poverty Effects on Child Development and Schooling To help children from low-income families cope with poverty, interventions touching in the child’s development and educational outcomes are essential. Those programs campaign against the effects of poverty among children by providing basic nutritional, academic, […]
• The Problem of Poverty in Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” To see the situation from the perspective of its social significance, it is necessary to refer to Mills’ concept of sociological imagination and to the division of problems and issues into personal and social ones.
• Poverty and the Environment The human population affects the environment negatively due to poverty resulting to environmental degradation and a cycle of poverty. Poverty and the environment are interlinked as poverty leads to degradation of the environment.
• Poverty and Its Effects on Childhood Education The foremost strength of Guo’s study is that in it, author succeeded with substantiating the full soundness of an idea that children’s exposure to poverty cannot possibly be thought of as only the factor that […]
• Poverty in India and China India’s slow rate of poverty reduction compared to China is due to the differences in their approach to the economy. Improving the living conditions and general well being of the people is not only the […]
• The End of Poverty Philippe Diaz’s documentary, The End of Poverty, is a piece that attempts to dissect the causes of the huge economic inequalities that exist between countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
• Poverty Areas and Effects on Juvenile Delinquency The desire to live a better life contributes to the youths engaging in crimes, thus the increase in cases of juvenile delinquencies amid low-income families. The studies indicate that the fear of poverty is the […]
• The Philippines’ Unemployment, Inequality, Poverty However, despite the strong emphasis of the government on income equality and poverty reduction along with the growth of GDP, both poverty and economic and social inequality remain persistent in the Philippines.
• Poverty in Africa These pictures have been published online to show the world the gravity of the poverty situation in the African continent. The pictures represent the suffering of majority of the African people as a result of […]
• Children Living in Poverty and Education The presence of real subjects like children is a benefit for the future of the nation and a free education option for poor families to learn something new and even use it if their children […]
• Community Work: Helping People in Poverty The first project would be water project since you find that in most villages water is a problem, hence $100 would go to establishing this project and it’s out of these water then the women […]
• The Singer Solution to World Poverty: Arguments Against The article compares the lives of people in the developed world represented by America and that of developing world represented by Brazil; It is about a school teacher who sells a young boy for adoption […]
• Cause and Effect of Poverty For example, the disparities in income and wealth are considered as a sign of poverty since the state is related to issues of scarcity and allocation of resources and influence.
• Poverty Simulation Reflection and Its Influence on Life Something that stood out to me during the process is probably the tremendous emotional and psychological impact of poverty on a person’s wellbeing.
• Analysis of a Social Problem: Poverty Furthermore, the World Bank predicts that both the number of people and the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty will increase in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
• Poverty Through a Sociological Lens Poverty-stricken areas, such as slums, rural villages, and places hit by disasters, lack the required economic activities to improve the employment and wealth status of the people.
• “The Hidden Reason for Poverty…” by Haugen It is also noteworthy that some groups of people are specifically vulnerable and join the arrays of those living in poverty.
• Poverty Policy Recommendations Different leaders have considered several policies and initiatives in the past to tackle the problem of poverty and empower more people to lead better lives.
• Environmental Degradation and Poverty It is however important to understand the causes of the environmental degradation and the ways to reduce them, which will promote the improvement of the environmental quality.
• The Myth of the Culture of Poverty Unfortunately, rather all of the stereotypes regarding poor people are widespread in many societies and this has served to further increase the problem of generational poverty. Poor people are regarded to be in the state […]
• Poverty in New York City, and Its Reasons The poverty rate for seniors in New York is twice the poverty rate in the United States. New York City’s blacks and Hispanics have a much higher poverty rate than whites and Asians in the […]
• Political Economy: Relationship Between Poverty, Inequality, and Nationalism The prevalence of nationalism leads to changes in the education system, as the government tries to justify the superiority of the country by altering the curriculum.
• Poverty as a Great Social Problem and Its Causes The human capital model assumes that the inadequate incomes of the working poor are the result of characteristics of the labor market rather than the inadequacy of the poor.
• Social Issues of Families in Poverty With the tightened budget, parents of the families living in poverty struggle to make ends meet, and in the course of their struggles, they experience many stresses and depressions.
• Aspects of Global Poverty There are arguments that have been put forth in regard to the causes of poverty in various nations with some people saying that the governments in various nations are there to be blamed for their […]
• Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development The research focuses on the causes of poverty and the benefits of poverty alleviation in achieving sustainable development. One of the causes of poverty is discrimination and social inequality.
• Poverty and Global Food Crisis: Food and Agriculture Model Her innovative approach to the issue was to measure food shortages in calories as opposed to the traditional method of measuring in pounds and stones.
• The Connection Between Poverty and Mental Health Problems The daily struggle to earn a daily bread takes a toll on an individual mental health and contributes to mental health problem.
• Global Poverty: Famine, Affluence, and Morality In the article Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Michael Slote contends that rich people have a moral obligation to contribute more to charities.
• Reflective Analysis of Poverty It can be further classified into absolute poverty where the affected do not have the capability to make ends meet, and relative poverty which refer to the circumstances under which the afflicted do not have […]
• Children in Poverty in Kampong Ayer, Brunei Part of the reason is likely malnutrition that results from the eating or consumption patterns of the families and also dependency on the children to help out with the family or house chores.
• Poverty and Diseases A usual line of reasoning would be that low income is the main cause of health-related problems among vulnerable individuals. Such results that the relationship between mental health and poverty is, in fact, straightforward.
• Poverty, Government and Unequal Distribution of Wealth in Philippines The author of the book Poverty And The Critical Security Agenda, Eadie, added: Quantitative analyses of poverty have become more sophisticated over the years to be sure, yet remain problematic and in certain ways rooted […]
• Poverty in Bambara’s The Lesson and Danticat’s A Wall of Fire Rising It is important to note the fact that culture-based poverty due to discrimination of the past or political ineffectiveness of the nation can have a profound ramification in the lives of its victims.
• Child Poverty and Academic Achievement Association It is expected to pay attention to the challenges and problems poor children and their families may face in their lives.
• Poverty, Inequality and Social Policy Understanding The roots of inequality can relate to both welfare and some other factors, for example, the judiciary. Therefore, the principle of equality is violated, and social norms cannot be considered to be respected.
• Inequality and Poverty Relationship To begin with, it is necessary to define the concepts of poverty and inequality. As of inequality, it is the difference in access to income, power, education, and whatever.
• The Rise of Poverty in the US The main issue that is portrayed in the article is the presence of the invisible poor and the homeless poor in the US.
• Concept of Poverty The main difference between this definition and other definitions of poverty highlighted in this paper is the broad understanding of the concept.
• Poverty and Development Into the 21st Century The choices of citizens in the west influence the consumer, as well as political behaviors of the consumers and voters in the developing regions.
• Third World Countries and the Barriers Stopping Them to Escape Poverty The phrase Third World was initially used in the Cold War period to represent those countries that were neither on the West NATO nations referred to as the first world countries, nor on the East-Communist […]
• War on Poverty in US The term war on poverty officially came into being in 1964 and referred to concerted government efforts to eradicate assiduous poverty in the United States of America.
• Poverty in the Bronx: Negative Effects of Poverty South Bronx is strictly the southwestern part of the borough of Bronx and Bronx is the only borough in New York city in the mainland.
• The Poverty Issue From a Sociological Perspective The core of the perspective is the idea that poverty is a system in which multiple elements are intertwined and create outcomes linked to financial deficits.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: The Global Response to the Ebola Outbreak Canada and Australia, as well as several countries in the Middle East and Africa, were the most active proponents of this ban, halting the movements for both people and goods from states affected by the […]
• Global Poverty: The Ethical Dilemma Unfortunately, a significant obstacle to such global reforms is that many economic systems are based on the concept of inequality and exploitation.
• Is Poverty a Choice or a Generational Curse? The assumption that poverty is a choice persists in public attitudes and allows policy-makers to absolve themselves of any responsibility for ensuring the well-being of the lower socioeconomic stratum of society.
• “The End of Poverty” by Phillipe Diaz In the film End of Poverty, the filmmaker tries to unravel the mystery behind poverty in the world. The film is arranged in such a way that the author has persuasively argued his case that […]
• Social Business Scope in Alleviating Poverty Instead of charity work, social business aims at creating a mechanism in which the poor may be helped in a sustainable manner in that the social business makes profits just like conventional businesses, but the […]
• Social Issues; Crime and Poverty in Camden This has threatened the social security and peaceful coexistence of the people in the community. The larger the differences between the poor and the rich, the high are the chances of crime.
• We Can Stop Poverty in Ghana Today One of the main disadvantages of the document is that the problem of poverty is not considered separately, but only as a part of other economic and social problems.
• Poverty in Urban Areas The main reason for escalation of the problem of poverty is urban areas is because the intricate problems of urban poverty are considered too small to attract big policies.
• How Poverty Contributes to Poor Heath The results show that poverty is the main cause of poor health. The study was purposed to assess the effect of poverty in determining the health status of households.
• Global Poverty Project: A Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Extreme Poverty The organization works with partners worldwide to increase awareness and understanding of global poverty and inspire people to take action to end it.
• The Causes of an Increase in Poverty in Atlanta, Georgia The key causes of the high poverty rise in the city include housing policies and instabilities, the lack of transit services and public transportation infrastructure in suburban areas, and childhood poverty.
• Thistle Farms: Help for Women Who Are Affected by Poverty As I said in the beginning, millions of women need help and assistance from the community to overcome poverty and heal emotional wounds caused by abuse. You can purchase a variety of its home and […]
• Median Household Incomes and Poverty Levels The patterns of poverty in the Denver urban area show that rates are higher in the inner suburb and the core city and lower in the outer suburb.
• Poverty: The American Challenge One of the main problems in the world is the problem of poverty, which means the inability to provide the simplest and most affordable living conditions for most people in a given country.
• Saving the Planet by Solving Poverty The data is there to make the necessary links, which are needed when it comes to the economic variations and inadequate environmental impacts of climate change can be distinguished on a worldwide scale.
• Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government The programs provide financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like housing and food. The anti-poverty programs that have been most effective in reducing poverty rates in the United States are […]
• Rural Development, Economic Inequality and Poverty The percentage of the rural population is lower for developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, the objective of the proposal is to determine how the inhabitants of the country in […]
• Global Poverty: Ways of Combating For example, one of such initiatives is social assistance and social protection programs, which ensure the safety and creation of various labor programs that will help increase the number of the working population.
• Poverty and Homelessness as a Global Social Problem What makes the task of defining poverty particularly difficult is the discrepancy in the distribution of social capital and, therefore, the resulting differences in the understanding of what constitutes poverty, particularly, where the line should […]
• Poverty: Aspects of Needs Assessment The target neighborhood and population for the following analysis are women of reproductive age, defined as 15 to 49 years, in Elmhurst and Corona, Queens. 2, and the percentage of births to women aged over […]
• What Is Poverty in the United States? Estimates of the amount of income required to meet necessities serve as the foundation for both the official and supplemental poverty measurements.
• The Caribbean Culture: Energy Security and Poverty Issues Globally, Latin American and the Caribbean also has the most expensive energy products and services because of fuel deprivation in the Caribbean and the Pacific regions.
• Poverty: The Main Causes and Factors Because of the constant process of societal development, the concept of poverty changes rapidly, adapting to the new standards of modern human life.
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
• Poverty and Homelessness in American Society It is connected with social segregation, stigmatization, and the inability of the person to improve their conditions of life. The problem of affordable housing and poverty among older adults is another problem that leads to […]
• Private Sector’s Role in Poverty Alleviation in Asia The ambition of Asia to become the fastest-growing economic region worldwide has led to a rapid rise of enterprises in the private sector.
• Connection of Poverty and Education The economy of the United States has been improving due to the efforts that have been made to ensure that poverty will not prevent individuals and families from having access to decent education.
• The Opportunity for All Program: Poverty Reduction The limiting factors of the program may be the actions of the population itself, which will not participate in the employment program because of the realized benefits.
• Early Childhood Financial Support and Poverty The mentioned problem is a direct example of such a correlation: the general poverty level and the well-being of adults are connected with the early children’s material support.
• Discussion: Poverty and Healthcare One of the research questions necessary to evaluate this issue is “How do ethical theories apply to the issue?” Another critical research question worth exploring is “Which cultural values and norms influence the problem?” These […]
• Explosive Growth of Poverty in America The three richest Americans now own 250 billion USD, approximately the same amount of combined wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the country. Wealth inequality is a disturbing issue that needs to be at […]
• The Problems of Poverty and Hunger Subsequently, the cause in this case serves as a path to a solution – more social programs are needed, and wealthy citizens should be encouraged to become beneficiaries for the hungry.
• “Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty” by Claycomb Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty highlights the widening disparity between the poor and the wealthy in America and how the economic systems are set up to benefit the rich and […]
• Decreasing Poverty With College Enrollment Program In order to achieve that, it is necessary, first and foremost, to increase the high school students’ awareness of the financial aid programs, possibilities of dual enrollment, and the overall reality of higher education.
• Poverty in Rural and Urban Areas My main focus is on articles explaining the sources of poverty in rural and urban areas and the key difference between the two.
• Reducing Poverty in the North Miami Beach Community The proposed intervention program will focus on the students in the last semester of the 9th and 10th grades and the first semester of the 11th and 12th grades attending the client schools.
• Food Banks Board Members and Cycle of Poverty What this suggests is that a large portion of the leadership within these collectives aim to provide assistance and food but not to challenge the current system that fosters the related issues of poverty, unemployment, […]
• Poverty as a Social Problem in Burundi The rationale for studying poverty as a social problem in Burundi is that it will help to combat poverty through the advocacy plan at the end of this paper.
• Poverty: Subsidizing Programs Subsidizing programs are considered welfare and net initiatives that the government takes to aid low-income families and individuals affected by poverty.
• Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? & How to Judge Globalism The article Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality by Robert Hunter Wade explores the phenomenon of globalization and its influence on the poverty and inequality ratios all over the world.
• The Problem of Poverty in Chad Thus, the study of the causes of poverty in the Republic of Chad will help to form a complete understanding of the problem under study and find the most effective ways to solve it.
• “Poverty, Toxic Stress, and Education…” Study by Kelly & Li Kelly and Li are concerned with the lack of research about poverty and toxic stress affecting the neurodevelopment of preterm children.
• Poverty in “A Modest Proposal” by Swift The high number of children born to poor families presents significant problems for a country.”A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift that proposes a solution to the challenge facing the kingdom.
• Life Below the Poverty Line in the US The major problem with poverty in the US is that the number of people living below the poverty threshold is gradually increasing despite the economic growth of the country. SNAP is not considered to be […]
• The Relationship Between Single-Parent Households and Poverty The given literature review will primarily focus on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between single-parent households and poverty, as well as the implications of the latter on mental health issues, such as […]
• Poverty and Its Effect on Adult Health Poverty in the UK is currently above the world average, as more than 18% of the population lives in poverty. In 2020, 7% of the UK population lived in extreme poverty and 11% lived in […]
• Child Poverty in the United States The causes of child poverty in the United States cannot be separated from the grounds of adult poverty. Thus, it is essential to take care of the well-being of children living in poverty.
• Juvenile Violent Crime and Children Below Poverty The effect of this trend is that the number of children below poverty will continue to be subjected to the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
• Poverty and Homelessness as Social Problem The qualifications will include a recommendation from the community to ensure that the person is open to help and willing to be involved in the neighborhood of Non-Return.
• Poverty Effects and How They Are Handled Quality jobs will provide income to the younger people and women in the community. The focus on developing and facilitating small and medium-sized enterprises is a great strategy but more needs to be done in […]
• Feminization of Poverty and Governments’ Role in Solving the Problem However, women form the greatest percentage of the poor, and the problem continues to spread. Furthermore, the public supports available are inaccessible and inadequate to cater for women’s needs.
• Free-Trade Policies and Poverty Level in Bangladesh The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which the end of the quota system and introduction of a free-trade system for the garment industry in Bangladesh has impacted on poverty in […]
• Poverty and Risks Associated With Poverty Adolescents that are at risk of being malnourished can be consulted about the existing programs that provide free food and meals to families in poverty.
• Poverty and Inequality Reduction Strategies Thus, comprehending the causes of poverty and inequalities, understanding the role of globalization, and learning various theoretical arguments can lead to the establishment of appropriate policy recommendations.
• International Aid – Poverty Inc This film, the research on the impact of aid on the states receiving it, and the economic outcomes of such actions suggest that aid is a part of the problem and not a solution to […]
• Poverty Effects on American Children and Adolescents The extent to which poor financial status influences the wellbeing of the young children and adolescents is alarming and needs immediate response from the community.
• Progress and Poverty Book by Henry George George wrote the book following his recognition that poverty is the central puzzle of the 20th century. Thus, George’s allegation is inconsistent with nature because the number of living organisms can increase to the extent […]
• Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The vicious circle of poverty is “a circular constellation of forces that tend to act and react on each other in such a way that the country in poverty maintains its poor state”.
• Global Education as the Key Tool for Addressing the Third World Poverty Issue Global education leads to improvements in the state economy and finances. Global education helps resolve the unemployment problem.
• Poverty, Partner Abuse, and Women’s Mental Health In general, the study aimed at investigating the interaction between poverty and the severity of abuse in women. The research question being studied in this article is how income intersects with partner violence and impacts […]
• America’s Shame: How Can Education Eradicate Poverty The primary focus of the article was global poverty, the flaws in the educational system, as well as the U.S.government’s role in resolving the problem.
• Global Poverty and Ways to Overcome It These are some of the strategies, the subsequent application of which would significantly reduce the level of poverty around the world.
• Social Work at Acacia Network: Poverty and Inequality Around the 1980s, the number of older adults was significantly increasing in society; the local government of New York established a home for the aged and was named Acacia Network. The supporting staff may bond […]
• Poverty and Sex Trafficking: Qualitative Systematic Review The proposed research question is to learn how the phenomenon of poverty is connected to sex trafficking. To investigate the relationship between the phenomenon of poverty and sex trafficking.
• End of Extreme Poverty Importantly, the ability to remain the owners of a substantial amount of accumulated wealth is the primary motivation for such individuals.
• The Problem of Poverty in the United States The problem of increasing poverty is one of the major political issues in the United States, which became especially agile after the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the difficult economic situation all over […]
• Poverty and Unemployment Due to Increased Taxation The government on its side defended the move while trying to justify the new measures’ benefits, a move that would still not benefit the country.
• Poverty as a Global Social Problem For example, the research shows that Kibera is the largest slum in the country, and this is where many people move to settle after losing hope of getting employed in towns.
• Researching the Problem of Poverty However, the rich people and the rich countries reduce poverty to some extent by providing jobs and markets to the poor, but the help is too little compared to the benefits they get thus accelerating […]
• Poverty, Social Class, and Intersectionality I prefer the structural approach to the issue as I believe the created structures are responsible for the existence of diverse types of oppression.
• Wealth and Poverty: The Christian Teaching on Wealth and Poverty To illustrate the gap between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest, a recent UN publication reported that the wealth of the three richest persons in the world is greater than the combined wealth of […]
• Guns Do Not Kill, Poverty Does It is widely accepted that stricter gun control policies are instrumental in alleviating the problem, as they are supposed to reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths, limiting gun access to individuals at-risk of participating in […]
• Poverty’s Effects on Delinquency The economic status of people determines their social class and the manner in which they get their basic needs. Seeing these things and the kind of life rich people lead motivates the poor to commit […]
• The Criminalization of Poverty in Canada In this regard, with a special focus on Canada, the objective of this essay is to investigate how public policy has transformed alongside the public perception of social welfare reform.
• The Issue of Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The persistence of poverty, regardless of the many shocks that every state receives in the normal course of its survival, raises the feeling that underdevelopment is a condition of equilibrium and that there are pressures […]
• Community Health Needs: Poverty Generally, the higher the level of poverty, the worse the diet, and hence the higher the chances of developing diabetes. Consequently, a considerable disparity in the prevalence of diabetes occurs between communities with high levels […]
• “Poverty, Race, and the Contexts of Achievement” by Maryah Stella Fram et al. The article “Poverty, race, and the contexts of achievement: examining the educational experience of children in the U.S. Multilevel models were then applied in the analyses of how children varied in their reading scores depending […]
• Microeconomic Perspective on Poverty Evolution in Pakistan The periodic spike in poverty levels, notwithstanding economic growth, implies incongruous policy functionality in relation to drivers of poverty and the subsequent failure to improve the indicators.
• The Impact of Poverty on Children Under the Age of 11 The strengths of the Marxist views on poverty are in the structural approach to the problem. Overall, the Marxist theory offers a radical solution to the problem of child poverty.
• Dependency Theory and “The End of Poverty?” It is also reflected in the film “The End of Poverty?” narrating the circumstances of poor countries and their precondition. It started at the end of the fifteenth century and marked the beginning of the […]
• Poverty Reduction and Natural Assets Therefore, the most efficient way to increase the efficiency of agriculture and reduce its environmental impacts is ensuring the overall economic growth in the relevant region.
• Corporate Social Responsibility & Poverty Alleviation Researchers state that “preventing and managing the negative impacts of the core business on the poor” are essential indicators of the social responsibility of the company.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: Indigenous Peoples of Canada Another problem that much of northern Canada’s Indigenous Peoples face is the availability of healthcare services and people’s inability to access medical help.
• The Problem of Childhood Poverty Unequal income distribution, adult poverty, government policies that exclude children and premature pregnancy are some of the items from the long list of childhood poverty causes. Before discussing the causes and effects of childhood poverty, […]
• Individualistic Concepts and Structural Views on Poverty in American Society The concepts presented in the book Poverty and power help to better understand the content of the article and the reasons for such a different attitude of people to the same problem.
• Poor Kids: The Impact of Poverty on Youth Nevertheless, the environment of constant limitations shapes the minds of children, their dreams and the paths they pursue in life, and, most importantly, what they make of themselves.
• Poverty: Causes and Effects on the Population and Country Thesis: There are a great number of factors and issues that lead a certain part of the population to live in poverty and the input that such great numbers of people could provide, would be […]
• The Internet and Poverty in Society The information that can be found on the web is a very useful resource but at the same time it is important to consider several things with the treatment and examination of the presented information.
• Poverty in Africa: Impact of the Economy Growth Rate Thus, a conclusion can be made that economic growth in Africa will result in the social stability of the local population.
• Poverty and Disrespect in “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody Life was not fair to a little Anne the chapters about her childhood are alike to a chain of unfortunate events that happened to her and her relatives.
• Vietnam’s Economic Growth and Poverty & Inequality A significant part of the population was active in employment, and this means that the numerous income-generating activities improved the economy of this country.
• Poverty and Disasters in the United States Focusing on the precaution measures and the drilling techniques that will help survive in case of a natural disaster is one of the most common tools for securing the population.
• Intro to Sociology: Poverty It is challenging to pinpoint the actual and not mythological reasons for the presence of poverty in America. The former can be summed up as a “culture of poverty”, which suggests that the poor see […]
• The Notion of “Poverty” Is a Key Word of a Modern Society As far as the countries of the Third World are deprived of these possibilities, their development is hampered and the problem of poverty has become a chronic disease of the society.
• The Problem of Poverty in Africa The major aim of the study is to identify the causes of poverty and propose best strategies that can help Africans come out of poverty.
• Poverty Sustainability in Sub-Saharan Countries: The Role of NGOs The position of research and statistics in undertaking social-counting work is not queried. It is after the research method is used in other tribulations of the charity that gaps emerge between management and research.
• The Effects of Poverty Within Criminal Justice The approach used in this study is deductive since the reasoning in the study proceeds from the general principle regarding the fact that poverty has a role to play in the administering of fairness in […]
• The Poverty Rates in the USA Poverty in the U. Officially the rate of poverty was at14.3%.
• Poverty in America: A Paradox Many people especially the young people living in other countries and more so in developed countries wish to immigrate to America instead of working hard to achieve the dream of better opportunities.
• Values and Ethics: Poverty in Canada The case study1 has indicated for instance, that the number of people living in poverty in 2003 is at 4. A group of individuals would therefore be granted the mandate to lead the others in […]
• War and Poverty Connection in Developing Countries The scholars claim that conflict and war in most nations have been found to exacerbate the rate of poverty in the affected nations.
• Poverty in United States. Facts and Causes Schwartz carried out a research which showed that in the United States, about 13-17|% of the individuals live below the federal poverty line at any one single time and poverty is one of the main […]
• Cultures and Prejudice: Poverty Factors For instance, if the two cultures had in the past interacted in a negative way, the poor culture directs all the blame to the well up culture.
• Poverty and Criminal Behavoiur Relation The level of accuracy that the data collected holds cannot be 100%; there is a level of error that affects the reliability of the data collected.
• Urban Relationship Between Poverty and Crime The areas with high poverty level in the US urban areas have the highest cases of crime but this is inadequate to justify that poverty is the cause of crime.
• The End of Poverty Possibility He presents the difficulty as in inability of each poor country to get to the base rung of the ranking of economic progress if the rank is achieved; a country can drag itself up towards […]
• Poverty, Suburban Public School Violence and Solution
• Social and Economic Policy Program: Globalization, Growth, and Poverty
• Is Poverty From Developing Countries Imagined?
• How Gender and Race Structure Poverty and Inequality Connected?
• Poverty by Anarchism and Marxism Approaches
• Colonial Economy of America: Poverty, Slavery and Rich Plantations
• Environmental Deterioration and Poverty in Kenya
• Management Issues: The Poverty Business
• Marginalization and Poverty of Rural Women
• Pockets of Poverty Mar the Great Promise of Canada
• Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis
• The Underclass Poverty and Associated Social Problems
• Child Poverty in Toronto, Ontario
• Children’s Brain Function Affected by Poverty
• Poverty Issue in America Review
• Microeconomics. Poverty in America
• Poverty and Inequality in Modern World
• Poverty and Its Effects on Females
• Poverty and Its Effects on Women
• Poverty of America: Economic Assumptions
• Poverty as a General Problem
• Feminization of Poverty – A Grave Social Concern
• Global Poverty Dimensions and Alleviating Approaches
• Poverty Level in any Country
• Theories of Fertility. Economics Aspect and Poverty.
• The Cultural Construction of Poverty
• Poverty in the US: Causes and Measures
• Poverty Rates Issue in Alberta Analysis
• “Old Age Poverty” Study by Kwan & Walsh
• Phenomena of Poverty Review
• Development Economics: Poverty Traps in Africa
• Healthcare Development. Poverty in the 1800s
• Social Problem of Poverty in the United States
• Poverty and Hip-Hop: Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”
• Globalization Issues and Impact on Poverty and Free Trade
• Anthropology: Culture of Poverty
• Poverty, Stratification and Gender Discrimination
• Teen Pregnancy Can Lead to Suicide and Poverty
• Poverty Around the World
• Poverty in Los Angeles
• “Rethinking the Sociological Measurement of Poverty” by Brady
• Poverty in the US: Essentials of Sociology
• Econometrics: Poverty, Unemployment, Household Income
• Religious Quotes on Poverty and Their Interpretations
• Poverty and Inequality in “Rich and Poor” by Peter Singer
• The Relation Between Poverty and Justice
• Canada and the Imposition of Poverty
• Poverty and Politics in “The Bottom Billion” by Collier
• The Impact of Poverty in African American Communities
• “Poverty and Joy: The Franciscan Tradition” by Short
• International Financial Institutions’ Poverty Reduction Strategy
• Social Study: Mamelodi Residents Living in Poverty
• Video Volunteers’ Interventions Against Poverty
• Poverty in American Single-Parent Families
• Single-Mother Poverty and Policies in the United States
• Poverty and Its Aspects in Historical Documents
• Economic Growth vs. Development: Dreze and Sen’s Analysis
• Poverty and Its Relative Definitions
• Poverty in America: An Ethical Dilemma
• Poverty as a Factor of Terrorist Recruitment
• Poverty Solution as a Political Issue in Australia
• Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism
• Breastfeeding Impact on Canadian Poverty Gaps
• Urban and Suburban Poverty in the United States
• Poverty and Child Health in the US and the UK
• Poverty Impact on Life Perception
• Energy Poverty Elimination in Developing Countries
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
• Vietnamese Poverty and Productivity Increase
• Global Health Governance and Poverty
• Poverty Rates Among Whites and Blacks Americans
• Culture of Poverty in the “Park Avenue” Documentary
• Poverty in the US
• Poor Economics and Global Poverty
• Poverty as a Cause of the Sudanese Civil War
• “Halving Global Poverty” by Besley and Burges
• Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence
• Poverty Reasons in Ancient Times and Nowadays
• American War on Poverty Throughout US History
• Poverty and Challenges in Finding Solutions
• Children and Poverty in “Born into Brothels” Documentary
• Poverty in Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London”
• Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
• Poverty in “A Theology of Liberation” by Gutierrez
• Poverty Reduction Among American Single Mothers
• The Relationship Between Poverty and Education
• Divorce Outcomes: Poverty and Instability
• African Poverty at the Millennium: Causes and Challenges
• Poverty Effect on Children
• Poverty and Education: School Funding Reinforces Inequality
• Global Poverty and the Endeavors of Addressing It
• Global Poverty Reduction: Economic Policy Recommendation
• Global Conflict and Poverty Crisis
• Poverty in the Novel “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk
• Profit From Organizing Tours to Poverty Areas
• Poverty: $2.00 a Day in America
• Detroit Poverty and “Focus Hope” Organization
• Poverty Controversy in the USA
• Poverty as the Deprivation of Capabilities
• Suburbanisation of Poverty in the USA
• The Solution to World Poverty by Peter Singer
• The Poverty Across the US Culture
• How Racial Segregation Contributes to Minority’s Poverty?
• Catholic Dealing With Poverty and Homelessness
• Human Capital and Poverty in Scottsdale
• Global Poverty Studies and Their Importance
• The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform
• Challenges of Social Integration: Poverty
• Globalization and the Issue of Poverty: Making the World a Better Place
• The Economic Effect of Issuing Food Stamps to Those in Poverty
• Business and Pollution Inequality in Poor States
• “Facing Poverty With a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim
• What Should You Do? Poverty Issue
• Causes of Poverty Traps in an Economy, Its Results and Ways of Avoiding Them
• Tourism Contribution to Poverty Reduction
• Millennium Development Goals – Energy and Poverty Solutions
• Sociological Indicators of Energy Poverty
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – Non-Traditional Cookstoves
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – World Bank
• How do Migration and Urbanization Bring About Urban Poverty in Developing Countries?
• Poverty and Domestic Violence
• The Rise of Extremist Groups, Disparity and Poverty
• Measuring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Australia
• Does Poverty Lead to Terrorism?
• “Urban and Rural Estimates of Poverty: Recent Advances in Spatial Microsimulation in Australia” by Tanton, R, Harding, A, and McNamara, J
• Importance of Foreign Aid in Poverty Reducing
• Hispanic Childhood Poverty in the United States
• How Poverty Affects Children Development?
• Why Is Poverty Important in Contemporary Security Studies?
• Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Chad
• Development Is No Longer the Solution to Poverty
• Issues Underlying Global Poverty and Provision of Aid
• Films Comparison: “The Fields” by Roland Joffe and “Hotel Rwanda” by Terry George
• Poverty Prevalence in the United States
• Terrorism, Poverty and Financial Instability
• Global Poverty and Education
• Critical Analyses of the Climate of Fear Report From Southern Poverty Law Center
• How World Vision International Contributes to Poverty Reduction
• Global Poverty, Social Poverty and Education
• Global Poverty, Social Policy, and Education
• Poverty Reduction in Africa, Central America and Asia
• Does Parental Involvement and Poverty Affect Children’s Education and Their Overall Performance?
• African Poverty: To Aid, or Not to Aid
• Poverty Fighting in Saudi Arabia and in USA
• Technological Development in Trade and Its Impacts on Poverty
• Social Dynamics: The Southern Poverty Law Centre
• Property, Urban Poverty and Spatial Marginalization
• Rural Poverty in Indonesia
• Is Poverty of Poor Countries in Anyway Due to Wealth of the Rich?
• Poverty and Gender Violence in Congo
• Correlation Between Poverty and Obesity
• Fight Poverty, Fight Illiteracy in Mississippi Initiative
• Civil War and Poverty: “The Bottom Billion” by Paul Collier
• Analytical Research: Poverty in Thailand: Peculiarities and Perspectives
• Poverty Indicators in Developing Countries
• Poverty, Homelessness and Discrimination in Australia: The Case of the Aboriginal
• Africa’s Poverty: The Influence of Western States
• Susceptibility of Women and Aboriginal People to Poverty in Canada
• MDG Poverty Goals May Be Achieved, but Child Mortality Is Not Improving
• Microcredit: A Tool for Poverty Alleviation
• Impacts of Global Poverty Resistance
• Reducing Poverty: Unilever and Oxfam
• Poverty in the United States
• The Mothers Who Are Not Single: Striving to Avoid Poverty in Single-Parent Families
• Effect of Poverty on Children Cognitive and Learning Ability
• Sweatshops and Third World Poverty
• War on Poverty: Poverty Problem in US
• Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right and the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• The Causes of Poverty Concentration in the Modern World
• Poverty in Saudi Arabia
• Poverty as Capability Deprivation
• Poverty as a Peculiarity of the Economical Development
• Capitalism and Poverty
• The Problems of Poverty in the Modern World
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Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

Enduring the current — a photo essay

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Has the Philippines created a garbage problem too big to dig its way out of?

BY BERNADETTE UY

Inclusive development has always been the outcry of the Filipino people but these calls usually fall onto the deaf ears of the government. Uy’s photo essay features Eduardo, a fisherman in Manila Bay, whose livelihood is just one of those that are in danger as the development plan in the bay is being pushed for implementation.

Early in the morning, the coastal community of Navotas is abuzz with small fishing boats unloading their catch. But Eduardo Dabandan, 49, lugs behind him several slabs of polystyrene foam held together by wooden sticks. For the past 10 years, this contraption has served as his main source of livelihood.

Eduardo grew up in Daram, Samar Province foraging for seashells. When he became a teenager, he went with older fisherfolk to the sea. He moved with his family to Navotas in 1997 and stayed there until 2010, when they were relocated to San Jose Del Monte in Bulacan after a fire razed their house.

Like a fish taken out of water, Eduardo found few opportunities for him in Bulacan. He offered his services as a sweeper at the relocation office. At first, the family was able to make ends meet with his P200 weekly salary. After a month, he realized it was not enough and opted to move back to Navotas to resume fishing.

Whatever money he saved, he sent to his family in Bulacan to pay for their house and other needs. His wife Maricris Dela Cruz, 45, and one of his sons later followed him to Navotas to help him earn money, while four other children stayed in Bulacan.

“Ayokong mawala yung bahay namin sa Bulacan, sayang naman. Para sa mga anak ko iyon, kaya heto tiis muna dito, nakakauwi na lang kami kapag may sobrang perang pamasahe (I don’t want to lose our home in Bulacan. It’s for my children, that’s why we persevere. We go home when there’s extra money for the fare),” Eduardo said.

He’s worried about the children, knowing that it’s different without parents around them.

When he got back to fishing in Navotas, Eduardo found a sidewalk where he could hang a hammock to rest on. Later, he and Maricris built a makeshift structure that became their temporary home. He’s worried they would be asked to move again to Bulacan with the implementation of the Manila Bay Sustainable Development Master Plan (MBSDMP), which involves reclamation. Their shack is just meters away from a backhoe being used for a reclamation project on the coast.

Eduardo is among the many fisherfolk relying on Manila Bay for their day-to-day subsistence, struggling amid the blooming commercial developments around them.

They are almost invisible to the rest of Metro Manila, whose collective memory of Manila Bay usually includes the scenic sunset, people strolling or jogging on the bay walk, and sailing boats at the yacht club. This is just a portion of the key harbor that spans eight provinces. Manila Bay is a strategic location for trade, livelihood, and other non-formal economic activities.

In 2017, the National Economic and Development Authority released the Manila Bay master plan and identified projects, programs and activities for the rehabilitation and development of the bay.

It has four “pillars”: Intercoastal Zone Management Framework, Priority Measures, Enabling Environments, and Optimizing Stakeholder Engagement. According to Rex Victor Cruz, leader of the team of experts in the Manila Bay Task Force, the master plan will fail without any one of the four pillars.

Cruz however clarified that the MBSDMP was not a “complete” plan. It provides guidance to local government units, national government agencies, and other stakeholders in charge of its implementation.

Devralin Lagos, a community worker who attended two meetings to craft strategies for the master plan in 2018, said fisherfolk needed to be consulted as their livelihoods would be affected by reclamation and other projects at Manila Bay.

“Based on my experience in Cavite and Bulacan, people are unaware of the master plan,” Lagos said. “[They should be consulted] if the project really aspires to reflect the concerns of stakeholders, not only of the development designers and government.”

Cruz said the master plan was not set in stone and could still be revised in three to five years. The Manila Bay Task Force is working on three scoping studies focused on liquid and solid waste management and preventing flooding. 

Eduardo is hopeful after buying a new outrigger that finally replaced his makeshift boat. The money came from life savings. For him and other fisherfolk in Navotas, every day is a challenge to protect and sustain their livelihoods. Rather than sink them, the master plan, Eduardo said, should help keep them afloat.

Navotas City’s coastal villages are part of the Manila Bay Sustainable Development Master Plan. Some 4,000 households depend on fishing.

Eduardo Dabandan, 49, has lived in Navotas since 1997, but had to relocate to Bulacan after a fire that razed their house in 2010. The lack of livelihood for fisherfolk in Bulacan forced him to return to Navotas. For more than a decade, Eduardo has used a makeshift boat made of polystyrene foam and sticks for fishing. It does not provide any kind of protection, but Eduardo knows how to swim and observe the environment and weather before going to the sea. 

Eduardo carries his makeshift boat as he goes out fishing with his new outrigger. Eduardo and his son Edwin will have to travel more than 30 minutes to reach their fishing spot, where they will stay overnight hoping to catch enough fish to eat and to sell. Pollution and competition with bigger vessels have made it harder to catch fish in recent years.

After 10 years of saving money, Eduardo has bought a new boat, named after his youngest son “Marby.” The maiden voyage of “Marby” the boat brings a subtle smile to Eddie’s eyes. Eddie is proud to have made both ends meet and save enough to buy a new outrigger.

Eduardo earns between P300 to P500 daily from his catch, but on a bad day, this could go down to zero. His wife Maricris Dela Cruz makes sure there’s enough money to buy food, while saving whatever they can to send to their children in Bulacan. If anything, they do not have to worry about their daily meals, because they can get what they need from the sea.

Eduardo and his family eat lunch inside their makeshift tent. In between cooking and preparing for his fishing trip later that day, what worries him is how his four children in Bulacan are coping without their parents. He smiles as he recalls how happy they were during meal time.

A backhoe used for reclamation sits idle on top of dirt. In this area alone, there are 10 families taking shelter in makeshift tents, all of them fisherfolk who depend on the sea for daily subsistence. Some families staying here are also from the relocation site in Bulacan like Eduardo’s. What they earned at the relocation site was not enough to make ends meet.

People forage for shellfish as water gets shallow during low tide along the coast of Barangay Tangos South in Navotas City. In the background, a backhoe is parked on a reclamation site. People there have been told they would need to relocate soon to give way to the development of the coast.

Fisherfolk gather krill as the sun sets. Others harvest what they can as they expect lean days ahead. According to a longtime resident, thousands of birds may be quite a sight, but is actually a bad omen to fisherfolk. The presence of these birds signifies that there will be no fish for the next couple of days. Birds flock near the shore to eat krill and fish that have surfaced because of pollution.

This story is one of the twelve photo essays produced under the Capturing Human Rights fellowship program, a seminar and mentoring project

organized by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and the Photojournalists’ Center of the Philippines. 

Check the other photo essays here.

Larry Monserate Piojo – “Terminal: The constant agony of commuting amid the pandemic”

Orange Omengan – “Filipinos face the mental toll of the Covid-19 pandemic”

Lauren Alimondo – “In loving memory”

Gerimara Manuel – “Pinagtatagpi-tagpi: Mother, daughter struggle between making a living and modular learning”

Pau Villanueva – “Hinubog ng panata: The vanishing spiritual traditions of Aetas of Capas, Tarlac”

Bernice Beltran – “Women’s ‘invisible work'”

Dada Grifon – “From the cause”

Bernadette Uy – “Enduring the current”

Mark Saludes – “Mission in peril”

EC Toledo – “From sea to shelf: The story before a can is sealed”

Ria Torrente – “HIV positive mother struggles through the Covid-19 pandemic”

Sharlene Festin – “Paradise lost”

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Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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Alexander Conrady | Children living in poverty in the Philippines

I do documentary photography of children living in poverty in the Philippines . There is wide spread poverty in the Philippines, particularly in the “mega cities” such as Manila. These are photos of the children of people who migrated from the countryside to Manila, hoping to find work and looking for a better life. Instead, their children find themselves in worst poverty than before: living of scrap food at garbage sites, hanging and sleeping in the streets because they have no money for housing, doing drugs. These children don’t attend school. There is no work for them. Their lives waste away. There is no perspective, no hope for change.

While I was working on this photo essay my story became one about street children who are becoming dependent on a street drug called Paglipad (flying) . This drug gave them the feeling of flight. Many of the children in the pictures are high most of the day because solvents are more easily available to them than food. As a consequence, they are severely malnourished. Many die. The problem is widespread. Locals and tourists ignore the street children.

I have spent time with a group of these children. I have been deeply moved by them, living in a city that is celebrated for an economic revival – a revival that affects only a small percentage of the population. I am overwhelmed by the hopelessness of their situation. I hope that my pictures create awareness and that social documentary photography will eventually end the ordeal that the children are experiencing. I am optimistic that national and international agencies will eventually alleviate the suffering of the Manila street children.

Q&A with Alexander Conrady

Photography is….

Photography is my obsession for freedom.

Photography and writing…

The photographer has the responsibility to take his camera on a journey into the real world. The writer can take the same journey. However, he is allowed to seek refuge in the abstract world. Together they can form an even more powerful team that enables them to tell stories. Stories that give people a voice and describe the world we are living in.

Who left the biggest impression on you?

The medium of photography itself! In its purest form photography is a truly democratic space. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from, all that counts is the final photograph. But if I had to pick photographers that inspired me the most, I would choose Sebastio Salgado and Eugene Richards.

Alexander Conrady

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How Photographs of Poverty in the Americas Ignited an International Battle over Propaganda

O fotógrafo Henri Ballot com Ely-Samuel, à esquerda, e seus irmãos (Photographer Henri Ballot with Ely-Samuel and his brothers) , 1961, Henri Ballot. 6.9 x 9.3 in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

In late July 1961, O Cruzeiro magazine—Brazil’s answer to the American magazine Life —sent photographer Henri Ballot to document poverty in New York City. Ballot’s assignment had been issued in direct response to “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” a photo-essay Life  had published the month before featuring reporting, diary entries, and photographs by Gordon Parks about the living conditions of young Flávio da Silva and his family in the favela of Catacumba in Rio de Janeiro.

O Cruzeiro  had taken issue with the suggestion in the Life photo-essay, popularly known as “the Flávio Story,” that poverty was endemic to Brazil and to Rio, the country’s best-known city.

On October 7, 1961, O Cruzeiro  published Ballot’s photographs and reporting as a page-by-page comparison with “Freedom’s Fearful Foe,” heralding the report on the issue’s cover with a headline just as sensationalist: “Nôvo recorde americano: Miséria” (New American Record: Poverty”). Two weeks later, the October 20, 1961 issue of Time (a sister publication to Life ) included an article titled “Carioca’s Revenge,” which attacked the veracity of Ballot’s story. In November, O Cruzeiro  responded by accusing Parks of staging his reportage.

The clash continued for months. Why? In order to better understand this battle between magazines, we can look at the motivations of O Cruzeiro , Ballot, and Life at the time. Taken together, they convey a story about photography as a significant form of representation, interpretation, and documentation, and about the often ambiguous role it plays in what sociologist Herbert J. Gans has called the “symbolic arena” of the international news media.

Edifício onde morava a família Gonzalez (The Building Where the Gonzalez Family Lived), 1961, Henri Ballot. Gelatin silver print, 7.1 x 9.5 in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

Origins and Evolution of O Cruzeiro

O Cruzeiro  began as a standard illustrated magazine produced in Rio de Janeiro and distributed nationwide. It was part of the media group Diários Associados , which had been founded and led by the journalist Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Mello, Brazil’s most powerful press baron in the 1930s. In the first period of its existence, from 1928 to 1940, it made extensive use of illustrations and photography in a wide range of articles and reports, with regular contributions from writers, poets, and visual artists.

In the early 1940s, O Cruzeiro underwent a change in its editorial policy, strengthening the link between journalism and photography. It contracted French photographer Jean Manzon, who had worked for both Paris Match  and Vu , to reorganize the magazine’s photography department. From 1941, Manzon emphasized photojournalism, but in the service of providing spectacle and sensationalist commentary rather than factual, objective, and impartial reportage.  Despite its tendency to stage content to fit its chosen themes—or perhaps precisely because of it— O Cruzeiro ’s circulation grew in the 1940s, achieving a weekly readership of more than 700,000 in the mid-1950s.

Such growth encouraged the magazine to invest heavily in hiring new photographers and journalists. Between 1946 and 1951, when Jean Manzon left the magazine, many new photographers joined its staff, including Henri Ballot, Luiz Carlos Barreto, Luciano Carneiro, Flávio Damm, and José Medeiros. This new generation arrived just after the end of Getúlio Vargas’s strong and dictatorial regime (particularly the Estado Novo period of 1937 to 1945), and following the country’s first free elections, which initiated nearly 20 years of democracy.

Working together with a new crop of reporters and graphic artists, they contributed to a significant change in direction for O Cruzeiro , producing a more engaged and humanist style of journalism and photojournalism.

The new photographers were inspired and influenced by the international photography and journalism of the 1940s and 1950s, which included famous photo-essays in Life by photographers such as W. Eugene Smith, the work of French photographers such as Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis, as well as events like the establishment of the Magnum Photos agency in 1947.

Quarto na casa da família Gonzalez (Room at Gonzalez Family House) , 1961, Henri Ballot. Gelatin silver print, 7.2 x 9.5 in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

Photographer Henri Ballot and His Side of the Flávio Story

Photographer Henri Ballot joined the staff of O Cruzeiro  in the early 1950s. The son of a Brazilian woman and a French engineer and aviator, he was born in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. When he was two years old, his parents moved the family to France. By the time he was 17, Ballot was already—like his father—a trained pilot, one of the first to work for Aéropostale, the French airmail service and predecessor of Air France (alongside well-known author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).

At the beginning of World War II, Ballot was imprisoned by German armed forces in Spain for four months for removing French airplanes from the path of the invading army. After he was released, he became a pilot in the Free French Air Force in England. He had a serious crash at the end of the war, when his aircraft was hit by German anti-aircraft fire, and landed in an area controlled by American troops.

Taken to a hospital in Colorado in the United States, Ballot was in a coma for months after the crash. After regaining consciousness, and during his long recovery, he learned photography in the hospital alongside other patients. Ballot returned to France, but in 1949 decided to relocate to Brazil. Soon after arriving, he secured work as a photographer for O Cruzeiro based at the magazine’s São Paulo office.

Between 1949 and 1968, Ballot produced many historically significant documentary photo-essays. For instance, between 1952 and 1957 he accompanied the brothers Villas-Bôas on their pioneering Roncador-Xingu expeditions to the rainforest-rich state of Mato Grosso, recording some of their first moments of contact with the indigenous peoples of the Xingu. He also documented the negotiations that culminated in 1961 in the creation of the Xingu National Park (today the Xingu Indigenous Park).

Among the other subjects Ballot covered as a photojournalist were migrants from the northeast of Brazil to São Paulo ( retirantes ), the coastal peoples of the Southeast ( caiçaras ), the samba schools and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the building of the Transamazônica highway. Ballot’s archive of more than 13,000 photographs is now part of the collection of Instituto Moreira Salles .

Criança brincando em meio ao lixo (Child Playing in the Trash) , 1961, Henri Ballot. Gelatin silver print, 7.1 x 9.5 in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

Ballot Takes on Poverty in the United States

For his assignment in New York in 1961, Ballot conducted research and consulted with various organizations and associations that supported the city’s underprivileged Hispanic communities. The photographer walked through areas of Harlem and the Lower East Side, depicting the neighborhoods and families living there.

His early explorations of New York focused on impoverished and marginalized residents found on East 100th Street, whom American photographer Bruce Davidson would also later feature in his famous series bearing the name of that street . Despite some false starts that yielded little, Ballot was determined to make an objective and impartial record of the social inequalities that existed in the United States.

After more than 20 days of walking the streets of New York in search of a potential subject, he chose to interview and photograph the Gonzalez family: parents Félix and Esther and their six children, including nine-year-old Ely-Samuel. Originally from Puerto Rico, they lived in a small tenement apartment on Rivington Street in the Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—not far from Wall Street, the financial heart of the US.

Crianças brincando no pátio interno do edifício (Kids Playing in the Courtyard of a Building) , 1961, Henri Ballot. Gelatin silver print, 9.5 x 7 in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

Ballot recorded his first walks, daily impressions of the city, and his encounters with the Gonzalez family in a revealing diary. This artifact, along with correspondence, news clippings, and a unique set of approximately 150 vintage photographs, provides a comprehensive report of his stay in New York and is preserved in his archive at Instituto Moreira Salles.

Also included among his photographs is an additional project that appears to have been triggered by the publication of  “Carioca’s Revenge.” Several images document visits Ballot paid to the da Silva family in Brazil during the early fall, after he returned from New York. These were complemented by interviews with José da Silva and some of his children, both in their new home (purchased with donations from Life ’s readers), as well as in their former Catacumba shack and the kerosene stall that José managed.

These images were ultimately published just one month later, in the November 18, 1961 issue of O Cruzeiro , and illustrate the magazine’s efforts to uncover fabrication and manipulation in Parks’s original coverage of Flávio and his family.

A Battle in Print—with Real Consequences

The dispute that developed between O Cruzeiro and Life resulted in mutual disparagement of both Parks’s and Ballot’s original stories. It also marked the future paths of the photographers. Both faced monumental challenges as they sought to defend and maintain the integrity of their original narratives while their respective publications waged a larger ideological war.

Parks and Ballot produced photographs under the auspices of photojournalism. The dossier Ballot put together on his reportage in New York is fortunately preserved in his archive. An analysis of his photographs, diary, and other documents does not reveal any intended desire to alter the facts. Rather, his work echoes contemporary exemplars such as Davidson, Helen Levitt, and members of the Photo League, who made detailed documentations of street life and social issues in New York City following World War II.

Editors at O Cruzeiro  chose to publish Ballot’s images in a layout that directly corresponded to how Life ’s editors had sequenced and edited Parks’s photo-essay. The unabashed comparison suggests that O Cruzeiro ’s editors felt it necessary to issue an unequivocal response to “Freedom’s Fearful Foe,” which would reinforce how poverty could be found in the largest city in the United States, just as it existed in Rio de Janeiro.

In retrospect, this was a questionable editorial decision. The layout in O Cruzeiro  invited accusations that Ballot’s reportage was manipulated, in part because it seemed visually weaker and less powerful than Parks’s, but primarily because it was clearly rhetorical and propagandistic. By failing to present Ballot’s work as independent and critical, the editors inadvertently exposed the Brazilian photographer—and the magazine itself—to criticism. This made it easy to ignore the content itself.

Família Gonzalez (Gonzalez Family) , 1961, Henri Ballot. Gelatin silver print, 6.6 x 9.5 in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

Despite Ballot’s and Parks’s respective efforts to report on the unassailable fact that both the Gonzalez family and the da Silva family struggled to survive below the poverty line, Ballot and Parks were effectively trapped in an editorial duel that exemplified how communication can be easily transformed into propaganda in the symbolic arena of the press. The two major illustrated magazines operated in a specific geopolitical context and moment, marked by the Kennedy administration’s first moves following the recent Cuban Revolution and its reverberations throughout the world, specifically in Latin America. At the very same time, Life  and O Cruzeiro were also competing for domination of the Latin American news market by distributing their respective Spanish-language editions throughout the region.

In this context, the original intention of many photojournalists who worked for these magazines, including Parks and Ballot, to communicate facts directly and objectively was often lost; instead, their content was edited and published with a strong symbolic and ideological slant.

The episode reveals how such approaches by the press can override and contaminate the subjects portrayed. It also had two important consequences for Ballot: he was forced to live with Time ’s accusation—which he emphatically denied—that he had modified images in his report, especially a shocking image of Ely-Samuel Gonzalez in bed as cockroaches crawled over his body, and was also refused entry to the US after O Cruzeiro  published the report.

Today, photographic images continue to be powerful, particularly given corporate journalism networks and social media. They contend with many of the same issues evident in the confrontation between Life  and O Cruzeiro : questions of authorship, documentation, editing, ethics, staging, ideology, and propaganda.

To understand the role of photography, now and then, we must be capable of critically discerning how every photographic image is presented to us. This is still a significant challenge, especially in a world struggling with the increasing pervasiveness of “fake news.”

Vista dos edifícios de Wall Street (View of Wall Street Buildings) , 1961, Henri Ballot. Gelatin silver print, 9.5 x 7.1in. Copyright Instituto Moreira Salles Collection

This essay originally appeared in the iris (CC BY 4.0)

Additional resources:

Gordon Parks at Smarthistory

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5 Essays About Poverty Everyone Should Know

Poverty is one of the driving forces of inequality in the world. Between 1990-2015, much progress was made. The number of people living on less than $1.90 went from 36% to 10%. However, according to the World Bank , the COVID-19 pandemic represents a serious problem that disproportionately impacts the poor. Research released in February of 2020 shows that by 2030, up to ⅔ of the “global extreme poor” will be living in conflict-affected and fragile economies. Poverty will remain a major human rights issue for decades to come. Here are five essays about the issue that everyone should know:

“We need an economic bill of rights” –  Martin Luther King Jr.

The Guardian published an abridged version of this essay in 2018, which was originally released in Look magazine just after Dr. King was killed. In this piece, Dr. King explains why an economic bill of rights is necessary. He points out that while mass unemployment within the black community is a “social problem,” it’s a “depression” in the white community. An economic bill of rights would give a job to everyone who wants one and who can work. It would also give an income to those who can’t work. Dr. King affirms his commitment to non-violence. He’s fully aware that tensions are high. He quotes a spiritual, writing “timing is winding up.” Even while the nation progresses, poverty is getting worse.

This essay was reprinted and abridged in The Guardian in an arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King. Jr. The most visible representative of the Civil Rights Movement beginning in 1955, Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. His essays and speeches remain timely.

“How Poverty Can Follow Children Into Adulthood” – Priyanka Boghani

This article is from 2017, but it’s more relevant than ever because it was written when 2012 was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That’s no longer the case. In 2012, around ¼ American children were in poverty. Five years later, children were still more likely than adults to be poor. This is especially true for children of colour. Consequences of poverty include anxiety, hunger, and homelessness. This essay also looks at the long-term consequences that come from growing up in poverty. A child can develop health problems that affect them in adulthood. Poverty can also harm a child’s brain development. Being aware of how poverty affects children and follows them into adulthood is essential as the world deals with the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Priyanka Boghani is a journalist at PBS Frontline. She focuses on U.S. foreign policy, humanitarian crises, and conflicts in the Middle East. She also assists in managing Frontline’s social accounts.

“5 Reasons COVID-19 Will Impact the Fight to End Extreme Poverty” – Leah Rodriguez

For decades, the UN has attempted to end extreme poverty. In the face of the novel coronavirus outbreak, new challenges threaten the fight against poverty. In this essay, Dr. Natalie Linos, a Harvard social epidemiologist, urges the world to have a “social conversation” about how the disease impacts poverty and inequality. If nothing is done, it’s unlikely that the UN will meet its Global Goals by 2030. Poverty and COVID-19 intersect in five key ways. For one, low-income people are more vulnerable to disease. They also don’t have equal access to healthcare or job stability. This piece provides a clear, concise summary of why this outbreak is especially concerning for the global poor.

Leah Rodriguez’s writing at Global Citizen focuses on women, girls, water, and sanitation. She’s also worked as a web producer and homepage editor for New York Magazine’s The Cut.

“Climate apartheid”: World’s poor to suffer most from disasters” – Al Jazeera and news Agencies

The consequences of climate change are well-known to experts like Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In 2019, he submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council sounding the alarm on how climate change will devastate the poor. While the wealthy will be able to pay their way out of devastation, the poor will not. This will end up creating a “climate apartheid.” Alston states that if climate change isn’t addressed, it will undo the last five decades of progress in poverty education, as well as global health and development .

“Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America” – Barbara Ehrenreich

In this excerpt from her book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich describes her experience choosing to live undercover as an “unskilled worker” in the US. She wanted to investigate the impact the 1996 welfare reform act had on the working poor. Released in 2001, the events take place between the spring of 1998 and the summer of 2000. Ehrenreich decided to live in a town close to her “real life” and finds a place to live and a job. She has her eyes opened to the challenges and “special costs” of being poor. In 2019, The Guardian ranked the book 13th on their list of 100 best books of the 21st century.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 21 books and an activist. She’s worked as an award-winning columnist and essayist.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

• Behind the Photos

How One Photographer Is Mapping America’s Poverty

F or more than 20 years, photographer Matt Black has been exploring issues of poverty, migration and farming in California’s Central Valley, painting a picture of extreme economic hardship in one of the country’s richest states.

Last year, he took to Instagram for his latest project, Geography of Poverty , using the social app’s mapping feature to pinpoint California’s poorest communities. His goal was “to get people that are on Instagram to picture themselves in these places,” he said in December after being named TIME’s Instagram Photographer of the Year.

Now, after spending two decades concentrating on California’s Central Valley, Black is expanding his project to the rest of the country.

“Occasionally, with my work in the Central Valley, I get the feeling that people can dismiss it by saying that it’s happening in some weird place in the middle of nowhere in California; that it’s an outlier,” he tells TIME. “But I know very well that the Central Valley is not an outlier. You can find similar communities and similar circumstances throughout the country.”

This knowledge forms the basis of the second chapter of Geography of Poverty , one that is taking the 44-year-old photographer all over the country, from California to Oregon, Louisiana, Tennessee and New York, among many other states.

Published by MSNBC , Black’s extended Geography of Poverty project is composed of two elements — the photographer’s road trip across America, plus four extended reports, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Trymaine Lee, that provide more context to the issue of poverty and economic hardship in four regions of the country. “You get the scope and breadth of the story through Matt’s road trip, but you also get a deeper dive from Trymaine,” says Amy Pereira, MSNBC’s director of photography.

For Black, the goal was to use the road as a storytelling mechanism. “Every stop along the way has a level of poverty above 20%,” he says. “I wanted to find a continuous route that linked all of these towns, which are no more than a couple of hundred miles from each other. And the fact that you can link all of these communities from coast to coast and back again is telling.”

As Black travels across America, he shows the people and communities he’s photographing a map where he’s marked all of his stops. “A lot of people have been blown away by it,” he says, as they’ve realized that “it’s not so much about the individual circumstances as it is about the collective whole.”

“What really dawned on me is how connected these places are,” he adds. “I’ve driven all the way across the country, but in a lot of ways I feel I still haven’t left the Central Valley. It feels like one place. Uniting them in this kind of visual document is challenging but immensely satisfying because it feels like I’m making a statement that needs to be made.”

The overall project, while not unprecedented in scope, has necessitated the heavy involvement of teams of developers and designers at MSNBC, says Pereira, as the entire hosting platform had to be coded from the ground up, especially when it came to linking Black’s Instagram posts to MSNBC’s mapping feature.

The photographer also had to seek additional financing from external organizations such as the Magnum Foundation, the Pulitzer Center — a foundation that usually funds non-domestic projects — and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “I think it’s heartening for photographers to know that it’s possible,” says Black. “You [can] put something together like this and get the resources to do it.”

For Pereira, Black’s personality and personal experience are part of the project’s overall success. “Matt has a sensitive and keen eye,” she says. “His humanity is so inherent that you can’t help but feel it in his images. He’s devoted his life work to telling a story of people who are very marginalized by their social-economic situation. He’s spent his whole life around these communities. He understands this on an intimate level. There are more than 45 million people living in poverty in the U.S. and people don’t want to see it. They’re busy with their own struggles and their own lives. Matt is showing people in a sensitive way.”

Matt Black Is TIME’s Pick for Instagram Photographer of the Year 2014

Matt Black is a freelance photographer based in California. Follow him on Instagram @mattblack_blackmatt. See more of Geography of Poverty project on MSNBC .

Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent .

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How I learned to stop worrying and love the Garfield

What a late-night standoff at motel 6 taught me about life, comedy and the famous lazy orange cat, by joey clift.

I love the classic newspaper comic character Garfield – from his lazy feline attitude, to his love for lasagna , to his petty hatred for a cute gray kitten named Nermal, If the goal of entertainment is to bring people closer together, Garfield is our society’s Monday-hating glue. It’s my enormous love for that wonderful sarcastic cat that brought my girlfriend and I to the Motel 6 near the Los Angeles airport at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. We were checking into the hotel’s only Garfield Suite, a hotel room filled with Garfield merchandise and elaborate decorations to promote "The Garfield Movie." Just as I was about to sign my name, I heard the Motel 6 employee say the words, “Oh no, we double-booked the Garfield room.” 

I looked up and saw two cash registers over, a hotel guest covered in Garfield arm tattoos. My girlfriend and I were adorned in elaborate Garfield shirts. Both parties had arrived at the check in desk at the same time with valid bookings for the same Garfield movie tie-in hotel room. The stressed staff had no idea how to resolve the quickly escalating situation. It was that moment that I’d learned just how far I’d go for Jim Davis’ greatest creation.

I devoured it like Garfield gorged on lasagna.

When I first met Garfield, I was a young kid growing up on the Tulalip Indian Reservation in Washington State. I was at a Scholastic Book Fair . My two obsessive interests were cute cats and the color orange. My 7-year-old eyes fell on a “Fat Cat Three Pack” featuring Garfield, who was orange, cute and cuddly in ways that my below-the-poverty-line upbringing was rarely allowed to be. He was everything I wanted, and with one look at his sour feline face I was hooked. I begged my mom to buy the book for me. Even though it meant we’d be eating store brand generic cereal for the next month, she caved. 

I read that Garfield book at least a hundred times. His constant complaining, love for coffee and abuse of the overly loyal Odie burned into my young memories. It became the start of my Garfield obsession. Channel-flipping on a weekday afternoon, I landed on the cartoon series "Garfield and Friends" and couldn’t believe it. Of course he was more than a comic strip! I devoured it like Garfield gorged on lasagna. I collected Garfield stuffed animals, books, anything of my new orange feline best friend that I could find.

But as I got older, my tastes changed. The things I’d grown up loving became too pure for my sardonic teenage brain. My focus shifted from the Monday-hating orange cat, toward weirder, darker offerings like Gary Larson’s "The Far Side,"   "The Simpsons" and "Late Night with Conan O’Brien " – but like a shadow, Garfield still followed me.

I made my comedy fandom a career, moved from the Tulalip Reservation to Los Angeles and dove into the local comedy scene with both feet. I performed at some of the biggest improv and sketch comedy stages in the country and eventually graduated to television comedy writing. I even received an Emmy nomination , a Webby Award win and credits writing for many fun and silly cartoons that are not unlike the "Garfield and Friends" series I loved growing up.

In my adult life, I hadn’t forgotten about Garfield, but as someone who writes jokes for a living , my feelings about him changed. I’d grown to despise the larger-than-life cat from Muncie, Indiana. Garfield was a comedy from a simpler time, where hating dieting and loving lasagna were good enough jokes to base an entire comic strip around. Like Garfield himself, the strip was comedically lazy and an example of the bland mainstream offerings that many of us in the alternative comedy scene pushed against. Instead of reading classic "Garfield," my favorite Garfield content were parodies created by fans. From Lasagna Cat ’s surreal live action Garfield inspired videos, to Lumpy Touch ’s videos reframing Garfield as a horror movie villain, to " Garfield Minus Garfield ," a comic strip that edited the titular orange cat from the series and in the process, painted Garfield’s owner Jon Arbuckle as an even sadder maniac.

I became an authority on him, which, as a Garfield denier, became as cruel a joke as a Monday without naps.

I even created my own viral Garfield parody content. Like the time I changed my Twitter handle to Garfield Official and used it to hijack an official Garfield Twitter Q & A by answering all of the fan questions before the actual official Garfield account could. The stunt was deeply frustrating for the Garfield social media team, but a hit among Twitter users and Garfield fans, receiving media coverage from The AV Club and The Daily Dot . Or the time I tried to get Paws, Inc. to give me the Garfield license for a Garfield pen and paper RPG I called “Dumb Jons & Nermals,” which was a great idea in practice, but Paws was worried it would compete with other Garfield board game projects they were working on. Then there’s the time I built a campaign to increase my social media followers over the pandemic in exchange for filming myself eating lasagna with my bare hands like Garfield. It turns out, throwing lasagna isn’t the most efficient way to eat, and only a fraction of the airborne cheese dish made it into my mouth. Afterwards, it took several showers to wash the marinara smell out of my hair.

Eventually, I posted about Garfield so much that to a lot of the people, I became an authority on him, which, as a Garfield denier, became as cruel a joke as a Monday without naps. My phone and social media blew up with texts and tags whenever any weird Garfield news would drop, and most holidays, my friends and loved ones gifted me merchandise or art inspired by the almighty orange cat.

At first, the gifts and mentions were ironic, and an easy way for my friends and followers to have a laugh, but it slowly became something more. Then one day, when I guested on a live recording of a popular NPR series, a fan approached me after the show and gave me a Garfield sweater she’d hand sewn into a ribbon shirt. When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, my uncle sent me a few of her old things to remember her. At the top of the package was a well-worn Garfield stuffed animal absolutely infused with the smell of cigarettes that my grandmother must have owned since the 1970s.

Garfield has been around for 46 years, and he means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. From older folks who remember him with fond nostalgia, to millennials and zoomers who spend their time creating ironic Garfield memes, to young kids discovering Garfield for the first time. In my life, I’ve been all of those things. I’m a visible Garfield fan, often posting on social media about him and even wearing a custom Garfield bolo tie to fancy Hollywood parties. In the process, I’ve become a conduit for people’s love of the ever-present funny monotone kitty. 

I used to view Garfield with a Monday’s worth of disdain.

Ask anyone of any age how they feel about Garfield, and they’ll have an opinion or a memory and honestly, that’s kind of beautiful. Whether you love him or hate him, he sticks to us like a '90s suction-cupped Garfield plushie hanging from a minivan window. And, in a lot of ways, Garfield is a self-care icon who lived his best life on his terms, which, as many of us are focusing on ourselves whilst surviving a global pandemic, is more relevant than ever.

So, we stood in the lobby of the Motel 6 near the Los Angeles airport a few weeks ago: my girlfriend Goldie Chan wearing a vintage 1970s Garfield sweater and I in a knockoff Garfield t-shirt with “F**k Mondays” printed on it in old English. With our bellies full of Olive Garden lasagna – in a polite, but quickly escalating showdown with a tattooed Garfield fan over a fully rented out hotel suite we both had valid bookings for – I saw tears in the other fan’s eyes.

At that moment, it wasn’t about who was right. It was about our mutual love for a comic character from our youth, that we were expressing by booking a stay in a limited availability hotel room brand tie-in decked out in Garfield merchandise like the “Garfield House” sketch from "I Think You Should Leave."

I gave them our booking in exchange for a few photos of my girlfriend and I in the Garfield-themed room. We left, hotel-less, and complimented the guest’s Garfield tattoos on the way out of the Motel 6 lobby.

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As we left the hotel at around midnight, blasting Lou Rawls' song “Here Comes Garfield” from the speakers of my Toyota Corolla Hybrid, we were sad that we’d missed our opportunity to stay in a suite themed after Garfield, but we were also happy. Happy that by giving up the room, we’d brought a Garfield fan the same joy that Garfield had given us. 

Though we lost the hotel room, that’s not the end of this adventure. After posting about our story on social media , many friends and followers rallied to our side. Motel 6 even reached out, offering us a free weekend stay in their Hollywood Garfield suite, the only one in the country with an immersive experience. And that’s where I find myself right this second, wearing a Garfield cardigan, a plate of lasagna at my side and in a hotel room absolutely covered in orange fur and Garfield memorabilia, writing about my time with the orange kid.

I used to view Garfield with a Monday’s worth of disdain, but now, he’s my deep, multi-layered lasagna, with infinite levels of cheese, marinara sauce and personal meaning. Today, I’m grateful to live in a world where I, and billions of people around the world can appreciate Garfield and all of his amazing and hilarious friends. Except for Nermal. He’s the worst.

about cats, cats and more cats

• A "talking" cat is giving scientists insight into how felines think
• Cats know the names of other cats that are their friends, study says
• Why we love cat memes

Joey Clift is an Emmy nominated comedian, TV writer, enrolled Cowlitz Indian Tribal member and Garfield fanatic based out of Los Angeles

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A Champion Sherpa Died Guiding Foreigners. Is It Too Dangerous?

Tenjen Lama Sherpa was one of the most storied mountain guides of his generation. Now, he and two of his brothers are dead, and their youngest brother must keep climbing to make a living.

A photograph of Tenjen Lama Sherpa at his home in Kathmandu, Nepal, in October. Credit... Atul Loke for The New York Times

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By Hannah Beech and Bhadra Sharma

Reporting from Kathmandu, Nepal

• Published June 11, 2024 Updated June 12, 2024

In July 2023, the mountaineer Tenjen Lama Sherpa guided a Norwegian climber to summit the world’s 14 highest peaks in record time. In a sport that demands an alchemy of sinewy resolve and high-altitude faith, Mr. Lama did everything his client did and more. But she received most of the money, fame and attention.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

The kind of lucrative endorsements enjoyed by foreign athletes are not usually given to Nepal’s ethnic Sherpas. For them, the profession of Himalayan guide offers a path out of deep poverty, but also a possible route — strewed with avalanches and icefalls — to a premature death.

Mr. Lama could not afford to rest after guiding the Norwegian, he told The New York Times. Life in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, was expensive. He could not read or write, but he wanted his sons to get the best education, a costly endeavor.

So only three months after climbing the 14 peaks, Mr. Lama was back working as a Sherpa — his name, his ethnicity, his profession and, ultimately, his fate. Another foreigner chasing another record had hired him as a guide. This time, it was Gina Marie Rzucidlo, who was trying to become the first American woman to climb the world’s tallest mountains. Another American woman, also guided by a Sherpa, was climbing separately in pursuit of the same record.

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