Unequal Scenes
Unequal Scenes uses aerial photography to make inequality visible.
From above, what can feel normal from the ground becomes harder to ignore: neighborhoods divided by highways, walls, rivers and rail lines; informal settlements pressed up against wealthy households; entire communities excluded. What interests me is not only contrast, but repetition. Again and again, across very different places, the same shapes appear. The same separations. It’s the very scale and unerring regularity across geographic regions which points to the systemic nature of inequality.
By using drones and helicopters for this project, I wanted to peek over the walls in my city and enter forbidden liminal territory. I wanted to see exactly what these empty places looked like. What I found, unsurprisingly, was that these landscapes are not accidental. They are designed, reinforced and maintained. It was hard to look straight down on those divisions without the unsettling realization that I, and we, the people gazing at these scenes, are implicated in the systems that produce them. Unequal Scenes is about making visible the structures we have learned to live inside, and showing that what looks natural in the city is often anything but.