Sometimes in journalism your work is overtaken by unpredictable events, and this has been one of those times at the magazine. The cover photo essay in this week's issue is about an area of the United States, the stretch between New York and Washington, that got whacked by Hurricane Sandy. But because we put this package together and sent it to our printer in the week before the storm, you won't see any evidence of Sandy in the pictures. Some readers may find that distracting initially, but these pictures deserve a long, close look. Although they don't reveal anything about the hardship and heroics of the last week, they do tell a powerful story about how the American economy has evolved over the last 50 years.
The photo essay was organized around the Amtrak route that links New York and D.C. If you've been on that train any time in recent years, you know it's regularly jammed with well-dressed professionals, many of whom are engaged in the lucrative, growing trades that link government and business. Meanwhile, the scenery outside the windows is filled with strange juxtapositions — natural beauty and suburban tranquility, pockets of fresh economic activity and an awful lot of dramatic post-industrial carnage. Massive abandoned factories. Blocks upon blocks of boarded-up homes. Heaps of smashed concrete and wrecked cars.
No hurricane, no natural force against which human efforts are futile, did this damage. This is the work of our economy.
Into this landscape, we sent Pieter Hugo, a South African photographer skilled at finding humanity even in the bleakest circumstances. He took the pictures for Barry Bearak's 2011 magazine story about a videotaped murder in the Diepsloot settlement in Johannesburg, as well as producing an unforgettable series of images from 2010 about a waste dump for computer equipment in Ghana.
This mid-Atlantic corridor used to be one of the most productive manufacturing areas in the world, and many vital goods and services are still generated there. There just happen to be many fewer jobs for workers who lack specialized skills. Hugo's brief was simple — connect with the people caught up in an economy that has changed faster than they can change themselves. This has been a kind of devastating storm, one that's lasted 40 years.
The fact that we are running Hugo's pictures on the eve of the election is no accident. They dramatize the cruel mismatch between a growing number of working-class people and the jobs that our economy creates, a political problem that has festered for decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, though neither presidential candidate has seen the advantage in making an issue of it. As Adam Davidson writes in his essay accompanying Hugo's picture, when it comes to speaking to Americans about real threats to their way of life, Pakistan is a safer subject to talk about.
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