Brittany A. Powell Explores Debt Crisis for Her M.F.A. Thesis

FAST COMPANY -- With her project, Powell plans to photograph and record 99 people across the country and from a variety of backgrounds, attempting to nudge viewers toward a less stigmatized view of debt. “A lot has surprised me, but most of all I think it was how many people really do blame themselves before blaming the system,” Powell said in an interview with Feature Shoot. “We don’t really share publicly, but we privately experience a lot of the same things,” she says in the film clip on her Kickstarter page, which is about $6,000 away from funding with eight days to go. The portraits, along with her subjects' debt stories, film and audio interviews will be shown at her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibit next April at San Francisco State University. After that, she hopes to take the exhibit on the road and turn the Debt Project into a book.