The Seven Percent

The Seven Percent

chashama 303 Gallery
303 10th Avenue
(between 27th & 28th Streets)
New York, NY

October 4 – 16, 2012

Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 4, 6 – 8 pm

Gallery Hours:
Thursday – Sunday, 2 – 8 pm
Tuesday, October 16, 2 – 8 pm

The Seven Percent is an exhibition of portraits, still lifes, and interviews representing the people behind India’s booming economy.  In recent years the media has depicted India as a booming economic powerhouse. The country’s seven percent growth rate represents a land of opportunity, modernization and development, with a fast-growing middle class filling some of the most crowded cities of the world.

Yet India’s economic success is rarely depicted beyond facts and figures in the business section. Traditional media outlets and human interest stories still dramatically highlight India’s poverty and underdevelopment. What about the stories behind the successful and affluent, the individuals riding the economic upswing?

The Seven Percent aims to address this discrepancy through a series of portraits, still lifes and interviews. Each of the fifteen stories takes three different approaches: a photograph of the subject in his or her comfort zone, a still life of his or her empty dinner plate, and a written profile. Together these give a complete image of each subject: their daily habits as well as their thoughts on life, their country and the future.

The work is the result of a month-long journey and collaboration between three artists. Reed Young is a New York based portrait photographer and FABRICA fellow whose work has been featured in TIME, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Fortune, and GQ, among others. Michael de Pasquale is a still life photographer based in New York whose commercial work spans some of the worlds most famous companies and agencies; he is currently pursuing research in what he calls “contemporary archaeology” through portraits of spaces, people and objects. Annalisa Merelli is an Italian writer and FABRICA alumna who moved to India in 2008 where she has worked as editor of theindiatube.com and as a staff writer at Motherland.

The project is a work in progress, and the artists hope to work on future chapters of The Seven Percent, extending it to different areas of India.