The problem with photographing 'poor whites'

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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