Value of a Dollar, The Poverty Line

I’m sure many of us, to make a broad generalization, have said, “What can a dollar buy these days anyway?”

Photographer Jonathan Blaustein asked himself that question when, at two separate fast food restaurants in New Mexico, he noticed that a single and a double cheese burger both cost $1. He wondered why, with the extra patty of meat, the extra slice of cheese, the price could remain the same. So, set about he did to see just what could be bought for a dollar in New Mexico.

This story, by the way, came to me through my twitter feed from the good people at Good Magazine (@GOOD is Good Magazine’s twitter handle, and you should follow them), who actually tweeted this story today, which is by Stephen Chow and is very similar to Blaustein’s story, just replace New Mexico with China, and one dollar with 49 cents.

I started with Blaustein’s story, which is actually from last October, because I felt that “What can you buy with one dollar” is a little more common of a phrase than “What can you buy with 49 cents”.

Here are some of Blaustein’s photographs.

Organic Grapefuit

Grapefruit from SuperSave

Side salad from Burger King with ranch dressing

And here is the only photograph of Chow’s I can link to (his site is all flash).

Peanuts

There is no caption provided, but it looks like maybe a pound of peanuts? Be sure to check out the rest of the project here.

The backgrounds the two photographers chose is important to contrast. Blaustein apparently painted the walls of his apartment white and started photographing, changing angle and position for each photo. He wanted the food to be the stars of his photographs. Chow, on the other hand, is clearly trying to make a comment on the wide class divide in China by making the newspaper – surely a symbol of the workingman – as the background.

I like the projects because they are so simple to execute, yet they speak to a larger social commentary. As photographers we can get caught up in thinking a complex story can only be complex to tell. These photo essays prove otherwise; they can be the simplest of ideas.

peace, love, and whatnot,

-rob

Self Initiated

Very, very inspired by the master, Mark Weaver.

It’s a little darker here than I intended it to be. Anyway, this is just something I decided to whip up spur of the moment at work today.

peace, love, and whatnot,

-rob

Andre and the Giants poster

One good thing (or should I say, one of the many good things) about being in a band is that is gives me another outlet for design work.

My band, Andre and the Giants, is releasing our first cd, an EP called “That’s the Jam ep”. We’re very excited.

If you’re in Columbia, Missouri on May 8, I hope to see you there!

peace love & whatnot,

-rob

Graduating must be scary

My girlfriend Caroline asked me to take pictures for her graduation announcements. This one in my favorite.

Thanks to Tim Rice for letting us use the studio just before he and Taylor Glascock and Alex Browning used it. Check out their blogs too. They’re classmates of mine.

peace love & whatnot,

-rob

‘R’ Drop Cap

I recently took up trying to make my own letters, trying to imitate one of Jessica Hische‘s projects – The Daily Drop Cap.

This thing took so long! I’m talking like 4 hours, a lot of it just spent on coloring.

I’ma try to make some more in the near future.

Be excellent.

peace love & whatnot,

-rob

In the immortal words of Caroline Lavelock,

Please be kind to each other.

Just because you have a strong opinion on an issue does not mean you need to try to engage in debate with anyone who doesn’t share them. That’s just bein a dick.

peace love & whatnot,

-rob

International Night Poster

Hey there kids – new blog! I’m DYING not being able to edit the CSS on here, so I may be buying my own domain soon. Is there a robbratney.com on the way? I guess we’ll see.

Please excuse the formatting inconsistencies from the old posts. The old blog had a much wider pane for text and pictures, but until I can edit the CSS for this page, or until I get the nerve to go back and manually change the width of photos from 1000 pixels to 650, the site may look a little janky.

Anywho, International Night Poster! I finished this one a while back, but they are just now being hung up around campus.

As the name would have you believe, the client wanted an “international” feel to the poster. My boss at the design center showed me this cool technique of tracing things and scanning them into your designs, so I did that with the country outlines and the text. Here those scans are.

With these scanned in, I began to mess with fill and stroke, and eventually ended up with these here:

And there they are.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize Miss Alexandra Browning for telling me that I could import my Blogger blog into WordPress.

While we’re on the subject of links, PLEASE go read designer Frank Chimero‘s blog. This dude is wicked smart. It’s scary. SCARY.

peace love & whatnot,

-rob