The "Image" Of Poverty... One Photo Reveals All To A Village

"The incapacity of the poor to see the pattern of their lives is occasionally breached. I took a color photograph of Wai and his family standing in front of their house, and when the people of the town saw it, it had the curious power to make them weep. It was just a picture of a man, like any other in the town, with his eight children formally lined up in ascending order, his pregnant wife, and his mother. But there was something awful in Wai’s rags, in the tilt of his head, in the foolish pride that showed in his mother’s face for the voracious horde of naked kids. The picture summed up his whole life, a symbolic rendering of his past and future. The people would look at it and gasp. “Oh, my God, poor “Wai.” Perhaps for just a moment they saw themselves. Wai, of course, was the poorest, but not by much. You could measure degrees of poverty in Rio Verde with one pot or one woven mat or a dollar's worth of fishhooks."
(Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen)