On the subject of poverty

“The subject of poverty has to be unearthed and looked at again. What is this, who are the poor, who really are the poor?…Real poverty is when life doesn’t meet the human needs, when the circumstances just simply don’t yield it, and can’t, no matter how the people struggle.”

“The world is not being photographed at all…only the spectacular, the sharp and…the bizarre episode….The underpinnings, the human condition…is lacking….The circumstances out of which our civil rights struggles come. What has produced the thing…we call poverty. Not the plight of the people who endure it, but out of what it comes, and the many kinds of poverty that there are….No one has photographed, so far as I know, the social phenomenon of prosperity. It is unrecorded.”