Photos show our common links
The Sk een Family, Pearland, Texas, Peter Menzel, 1994
Peter Menzel’s Material World: A Global Family Portrait was an ambitious and thought-provoking project in which families around the world were photographed with their possessions. This picture of the Skeens contrasts markedly with the meagre possessions of other families in poorer countries; yet the pictures also show the similarities shared by people around the globe.
Menzel is a photojournalist who had covered the Civil War in Somalia and the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991. Returning home, he saw America as “an idiotic capitalist selfindulgent society, where the sex life of a pop star is more important than
impending starvation, land mines and child soldiers in Africa”.
Menzel organised a project that involved him and 15 other photographers taking pictures of 30 statistically average families in 30 countries worldwide. It cost Menzel $600,000 to achieve, but the resulting book’s huge success earned back the money within three years.
Innovations and advances
The Advanced Photo System (APS) was introduced in 1996 by Eastman Kodak (under the brand name Advantix), Fujifilm (Nexia), Agfa Photo (Futura), and Konica (Centuria). It was mainly used for compact cameras, but SLRs such as the Canon EOS 1X and the Nikon Pronea were specially made for the format.
APS film was housed in a dropin cartridge, and the 24mm-wide film could be shot in three differentsized formats: H (High-definition), C (Classic) and P (Panoramic). The film’s optical and magnetic encodings enabled camera settings to be automatically read by the processing equipment and used to determine the print ratio.
The APS format wasn’t popular with pros or enthusiasts: the negative was smaller than 35mm film, but was more expensive. After a few years, the ailing format was finished off by the digital camera.