“Johnny Miller is a photographer and multimedia storyteller based in South Africa and the USA. He is interested in exploring social justice issues from the ground and from the air. His photographic project Unequal Scenes has garnered widespread praise and been featured in many of the world’s top publications” (Miller, 2022).
“Severe economic inequality is largely a consequence of human-enacted policies. Tin shacks in Cape Town are separated from mansions with barbed wire and concrete walls. Millionaires in high-rise aeries in Mumbai gaze down on informal settlements, their roofs covered in blue tarps to keep out the monsoon rains. Pollution-spewing highways belch toxins onto playgrounds in underserved areas of New York City” (Miller, 2022).
“Walls, highways and other infrastructure usually keep us from seeing the extent of the problem, usually by design. That always bothered me. By using drones and helicopters for this project, I wanted to peek over those walls, and enter into forbidden liminal territory. For the first time in our history, drones and social media are a cost-effective solution for depicting and then disseminating these separations. It’s hard not to look straight down on the divisions and not have an unsettling realization that we, the people gazing at these scenes, are also complicit” (Miller, 2022).
“The scale and regularity of urban structures constructed to separate people, in many different cities and cultures all across the world, points to the systemic nature of inequality. Evidence shows that high levels of inequality are correlated with worse health outcomes, like lower life expectancy, higher rates of heart failure, and higher levels of infant mortality. More equal societies are happier and more cohesive, and to a large degree more prosperous. Countries that are more equal tend to have far more generous, encompassing and egalitarian social systems” (Miller, 2022).
Drones, photography, and social media have allowed Johnny Miller to explore an unseen side of cities around the globe. The results were a raw unfiltered view of socioeconomic inequality. Inequality is prevalent in our society in the present, and it will be in the future, so the question that emerges is how do we bridge the inequality gap knowing that there will be a diverse range of incomes, circumstances, and abilities? Bringing attention to this inequality in a new perspective may be the first step in understanding how it is shaped in our society, and what we can do to change it. As Miller shows in his photographs, built infrastructure can promote inequality, so how can we use design to bring awareness to this, and how can design manipulate the world around us?
In the case of personal finance and well-being, can looking at these topics from a new angle, just as Johnny Miller did in cities, bring about a new perspective?
References:
Miller, J. (2022, September). Unequal Scenes About. Unequal Scenes. https://unequalscenes.com/about
