Documenting Disposable People

Slavery may be illegal but it’s by no means defunct (even if its guises have changed). More than 27 million people are still trapped in one of the world’s oldest forms of oppression. Documenting Disposable People features newly commissioned photo essays by eight renowned Magnum photographers—Ian Berry, Stuart Franklin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steele-Perkins and Alex Webb—on diverse instances of contemporary global slavery. With texts on each of these projects and an essay by expert and author Kevin Bales, this compendium explores a range of examples, including child labor in Bangladesh, sex slavery from Ukraine to Western Europe and the sexual enslavement of South Korean women by Japanese troops during the Second World War. Documenting Disposable People shows how the unfortunate emergence of a new kind of slavery is inextricably linked to the “ascent” of a global economy.