The hidden cost of cheap goods

Go look at the Chinese photographer Lu Guang’s photographs of the consequences of Chinese industrialization. Lu Guang was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for this project.

(And you can ignore the troll-infested comment thread.)

While you’re in a Chinese photography mood, turn around and check out Canadian photographer Ed Burtynksy’s work on Chinese industrialization and the Three Gorges Dam project. (Click his links at left.)

Burtynsky’s pictures look a lot cleaner — no stacks belching black smoke there — but he had to work as a guest of the government. And no one portrays the scale of our consumer society’s hunger for goods, or its effects, like Burtynsky does.