Soweto-$hanty

Soweto-$hanty
Originally uploaded by thegreatplotnik.

We see a child playing in the red dirt in front of the aluminum shanty where she lives in Soweto, South Africa. We see the incongruous dollar sign painted on the door. If the entire scene were expanded we would see many such shanties and many more children, and heavy-set women dressed in layers carrying water on their heads in plastic buckets, and unemployed men in thin windbreakers walking to the shabeen to drink home made beer from a communal bucket.

But no matter what we would see in reality, the dollar sign dominates the frame. Soweto is impoverished, but relatively well-off compared to most of the rest of Africa, or to people digging out of the earthquake in Pakistan, or abandoning their entire city under the mud in Guatemala, or escaping genocide in Rwanda.

How does anyone make sense out of this picture? The Great Plotnik has never seen urban poverty like he saw in the black townships of South Africa, but...this little girl has a shanty, cramped as it is, with a door on it. The door has been graffiti'd with a dollar sign. What is the message here?