Stefen and Lin Chow

What is poverty? Variable across time and place, it can be difficult to define. Stefen Chow and Hui-Yi Lin’s Poverty Line project poses this question, using food products as the visual representation of what it means to be poor. The photographer and economist teamed up in 2010, photographing various selections of food that could be purchased with the average daily wages at the poverty line in China. Since then, their project has expanded to twenty-four countries across six continents. Chow and Lin work in both developing and developed nations, where they refer to household consumption data to determine average daily expenditures on food. Contextualizing poverty within each country, their photographs present viewers with the tough choices that would be available to them in each particular location. A Beijing-based artist, Chow has received awards for his work from World Press Photo, National Geographic, and Photographie de la Paris, while Lin leads the China research operations of a global market research firm.

Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018