THE NAKED CITY: HARD CORE POVERTY PORN
Image: Poverty porn in action. Photo Cred: Fair Development Consulting
By COFFIN ED
Poverty Porn. It’s a term that immediately sparks concern and one that applies to varying degrees of exploitation on the part of the purveyors and outrage from those that call it out. Wikipedia defines it as “any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor’s condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers, increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause”.
In recent years it has also become an obscene and highly disturbing objectification of the poor and the homeless for the purposes of entertaining a privileged audience. Australia has not been without its share of poverty porn and around eight years ago SBS Television copped considerable flak for its warts and all documentary series, Struggle Street. Set in Mt Druitt, it focused on the lives and misfortunes of a number of selected residents and their families.
So hostile was some of the reaction that the then mayor of Blacktown Council, Stephen Bali, organised a convoy of garbage trucks to protest outside SBS, attempting to blockade the broadcaster’s headquarters. He demanded that SBS stop the broadcast telling the assembled media:
“The program is garbage, so we brought garbage trucks here. This program must stop because it’s not a documentary, it’s publicly-funded poverty porn.”
Since the Struggle Street controversy, TV stations and other local media have tended to tread carefully when it comes to focusing on poverty and disadvantage, other than in a purely news reporting environment. Likewise, many charity organisations have toned down their photographic coverage. Where we once saw distressing pictures of emaciated children with their ribs sticking through, organisations fighting third world hunger now focus on less confronting images, extolling the results of their various programs.
A more recent form of gratuitous voyeurism when it comes to those living in poverty is the number of personal vlogs on YouTube taking viewers on a walk through some of the world’s worst slums in countries like India and the Philippines. Manila’s sprawling shanty towns are a popular destination for these vloggers who have little regard for the privacy of the families who live there as they waltz through their ramshackle buildings, filming every daily activity in high definition 4k.
Their rationale is that they are focusing attention on some of the world’s most impoverished people, but the intrusive, in your face, nature of their filming smacks entirely of poverty porn. In some of the vlogs, nearly all filmed by well to do foreign tourists, slum kids and adults are treated to free food including ice-cream, with the vloggers noting that they have done their ‘good deed’ for the day. It’s one way of relieving the guilt of the privileged for just a few hundred pesos.
If the latter is the soft core version of poverty porn then a current US aberration, focusing on the Kensington area of Philadelphia is clearly the hardest of hard core. Best described as one of the poorest areas in one of America’s poorest cities, Kensington has become a refuge for the homeless and the severely drug addicted. There are now over seventy YouTube channels regularly recording their ongoing trauma for public consumption, many of them monetising their vlogs through the YouTube Partner Program and advertising revenue.
According to the Philadelphia Citizen:
“These days, it’s as common to see volunteers passing out food on the sidewalks of Kensington Avenue as it is to see people prowling the pavement with iPhones, recording people suffering in public view.”
Perhaps the sickest of all the YouTube channels are those that offer a 24/7 multi webcam coverage of the homeless and drug addicted gathering throughout the North Kensington hood. There are numerous close ups and a live chat where viewers discuss the destitute as if they were players in some kind of bizarre soap opera. The comments are often derogatory, ridiculing lurched-over fentanyl addicts and applying crude nicknames to many of the regulars.
It’s unlikely we will ever see such a gross violation of people’s privacy in Australia with webcams (for example, in Woolloomooloo’s Walla Mulla Park or Tom UrenPlace) and thank god for that. Clearly there are much better ways of highlighting poverty without turning it into a spectator sport.
