Carlos Spottorno's satirical photobook uses humour and stunning images to confront economic mudslinging
See a gallery of his images here
Pointedly designed as a pastiche of the Economist magazine, The Pigs by Carlos Spottorno is a different kind of photobook. Its title is the term coined by the business and financial press as a shorthand way of describing the ongoing economic plight of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. As Spottorno notes in his introduction: "What started as a pejorative label used by neoconservatives, mainly from English-speaking countries, was eventually taken up for some time without any qualms by the media."
The Pigs, he continues, is "an attempt to illustrate the stereotypes brought up by the term". To this end, his photographs are wilfully and provocatively stereotypical. In one, Portugal is represented by a young Gypsy boy holding his horse against a backdrop of urban apartments. In another, Italy is reduced to a rural hillside dotted with partially built houses. Greece becomes an ancient church surrounded by faceless glass office blocks, while, in a memorable image from – and about – Spain, a young woman parks her car beneath a row of uninhabited modern buildings designed to look like medieval castles.
"This is how I imagine economists see us," writes Spottorno. But there is more to it than that. Throughout, the reductiveness of economic stereotypes rub up against the extravagant absurdity of urban planning in the so-called boom years. It makes for a funny exercise in photographic satire; Spottorno is a political prankster par excellence. Born in Budapest in 1971, he has lived in Rome, Paris and Madrid, and worked as an advertising director, before becoming a photographer in 2001. His commercial work has been published by the likes of El Pais, National Geographic and Marie Claire France, and he has shot campaigns for Nike and Vodafone. A very postmodern activist, then.
The Pigs marks a distinct shift in his work, being politically engaged, hard-hitting and downright comical. Imagine a travel magazine that only shows a country's cliches, but in doing so, provokes you into rethinking your prejudices. Not that Spottorno is uncritical of the countries, citing in his foreword their shared tendency to idealise a semi-mythic past over the realities of the present. Or, as he puts it: "The Pigs are old, cynical and individualistic countries. The sense of community, so deeply rooted in northern Europe countries, is very weak in the Pigs, carrying as they do upon their backs the weight of centuries of hierarchical social structure, and being accustomed to both authoritarian and corrupt governments." Blessedly, his photographs are more punchy than his prose.
I love The Pigs' Economist piss-take, the way it walks a tightrope between caricature and political provocation. It seems like a valid response to the state we are in. Produced cheaply, it costs only €9.99 and has already generated an online response, The Pigs Community Gallery, where reportage from riots and demonstrations sits alongside stereotypical images of nationhood. We need a British – or should that be English – version, if only to undercut the smugness of our political leaders at not ever committing to the European project. Bring it on.
NOW SEE THIS
The new issue of Source magazine is dedicated to photography and literature, though its take, as ever, tends towards the postmodern. An intriguing essay on the creative friendship between Robert Frank and writer Robert Walser sits alongside In the Company of Mothers, a series by Hannah Starkey that captures women "in moments of reverie or absorption".
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