By Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann, Paul Kennedy
Thirty families in thirty countries carried everything they own out of the house and stood beside it while a photographer took the picture.
Sixteen photographers went to thirty countries and each lived a week with a family picked as statistically average for that nation. At the end of the week they did the same thing everywhere: took every object out of the house, arranged it in front, sat the family down in the middle of it, and photographed the lot. The Japanese family with their appliances. The Malian family with their pots. The Texans on the lawn with the truck and the sofa. Alongside each portrait are the ordinary facts of that household, what they earn, what they eat, what they hope for, what they would save if the house burned. Your child looks at one page, then the next, and the comparison happens whether anybody asks for it or not.
It is a real and famous piece of documentary work and it does one thing better than any atlas: it makes a country into a family with a name. A child can hold a statistic about average income for about nine seconds. They can hold the Namgay family's roof for years. It also gives a class the rarest thing on a geography shelf, which is a question with no answer printed at the back, because the pictures set up the comparison and then refuse to tell anyone what to think about it.