Photographer Seeks to Humanize, Personalize the Face of Student Loan Debt

People love posing with their things: a new car, a new phone, a new outfit, a new house. The picture shows ownership, the picture shows possession; what the picture doesn’t often show, however, is the debt.

Artist and photographer Brittany M. Powell is currently working on a long-term photography series: The Debt Project, a series of photographs of people, living with debt, surrounded by their things.

You can read more about the specifics of her project from her site; a recent Washington Post piece about Powell and her project also includes brief notes written by the subjects about how they wound up in debt. (Interestingly enough, too: Stephanie Eidelman has a piece on our site that looks at this issue from a different, though equally personal, angle.)

And almost every one of those notes mentions student loan debt.

According to a recent CNBC piece, there’s currently more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. This number encompasses 40 million borrowers with an average balance of $29,000. The default rate stands at roughly 13.7 percent.

Higher education remains the primary expected next step for graduating high school seniors. And while some have argued that tuition rates are slowing (at least per this 2013 article in U.S. News and World Reports), tuition debt itself continues to run laps around other prices.

Consumers with student loan debt find themselves in a vicious cycle: to fund continuing higher education, they’ll take on signifcant student loan debt, maybe with the idea that once graduated, they’ll be able to find a job with a commensurate salary that will allow them to pay back that loan. However, what is more often the case, is students either drops out of college, or find themselves in a challenging and unfriendly job market.

Which means they can’t pay back that loan.

And which often means that they find themselves relying more and more on credit cards.

Which means they’ve compounded their debt load.

And then they’re photographed by Brittany M. Powell in natural lighting surrounded by things and drowning in debt.

Powell’s installation seeks to humanize and personalize the face of student loan debt: “By photographing indebted people in their households, [Powell] was also capturing their debt. In America today, our houses and our sofas are often imbued with debt. Even our careers and our healthy bodies are often made possible through taking on debt.”

All signs point to student loans fueling the next economic crisis we face in this country. Powell’s portfolio is certain to grow.