The driving idea behind Finbarr O'Reilly's photographic essay on white poverty in South Africa, published last Friday in the New York Times, is that race shouldn't have a voice in the conversation. In some of the photographs he manages to achieve the ideal: the barefoot schoolchildren walking past a pile of litter; the woman living with her family in a wooden toolshed; the caravan park with its tragic flower gardens
But it's in the image of the long queue at the food truck that O'Reilly's ambition comes unstuck - the people handing out the food are black, the supplicants, with their weather-beaten faces and ill-fitting clothes, are white.
It's this reversal of stereotypes that is by definition where O'Reilly's essay finds its power, and while the goal of subverting race in South Africa is a noble one, there's a sense in which it appears disingenuous and naïve.
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