The Human Toll of Europe\'s Economic Statistics

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An interactive presentation of how the debt crisis has affected five European countries accompanies this post. We urge you to view it.

The numbers are grim.

After three years of grinding austerity, the Greek gross domestic product has shrunk by 25 percent. The unemployment rate among young people is now at 50 percent, and over all about one fourth of Greeks are out of work.

Ireland has a debt burden of 117 percent of its annual G.D.P. Spain's unemployment rate is more than 25 percent, and the Portuguese government is predicting a third consecutive year of recession in 2013, with unemployment reaching nearly 16 percent.

But statistics cannot show the full impact of the European debt crisis on the countries most affected. That is what David Furst, the foreign picture editor for The New York Times, was thinking as he orchestrated his section's coverage of the economic crisis over the past year.

“From the beginning for me, this was a story about people,” said Mr. Furst, 33. “The difficulty was to somehow translate a story of statistics into images that expressed the meaning of those statistics. The problems in these countries are largely rooted in complex financial instruments that are hard to understand - and bloodless - but the fact is that they play out in the lives of ordinary people that don't know what hit them.”

Often, the images of the debt crisis in the news media are of demonstrations or homeless people. While these are important aspects of the story, they are also the most obvious visual signs of the crisis and and provide little depth or nuance to coverage. So Mr. Furst decided to have The Times's photographers look else where.

“From the outset I steered our resources away from the demonstrations and pushed the shooters to focus their energy on the impact on people's lives - the demonstrations were often an expression of the anger people feel and part of the political struggle, but they don't illustrate how people are living the crisis,” he said.

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times Greek police rounded up suspected illegal immigrants in Athens on Aug. 31.

Over the last year, The Times published a series of photographic essays, by Samuel Aranda, Andrea Bruce, Adam Ferguson and Mauricio Lima that explored the human toll behind the numbers. The photographs have now been collected in a single online interactive slide show with text by Suzanne Daley. She writes:

When the economic crisis first hit in 2008, many Europeans assumed they were facing a couple of bad years. But the crisis, now in its fifth year, seems to go on and on, using up unemployment benefits, eating through savings accounts and dashing dreams of an easy retirement. European Union officials have struggled to turn things around - debating new treaties, shoring up banks, securing more funding. Yet, they have little to show for it. Looking ahead to 2013, the European Commission off ered nothing close to good news. “The economic and employment outlook is bleak,” the commission said in a statement.

For Mr. Aranda, who covered the Arab Spring and won a World Press Photo award last year, the assignment was unexpectedly challenging.

“When I received the assignment about the economic crisis in Spain, my first thought was that it would be nice to work in my home country. I was totally wrong,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think I faced some of the most difficult situations of my career photographing my neighborhood, friends, people that speak the same language that I do. It was hard to see people from my own country suffering and losing their homes and being evicted by police. But the big difference this time was that, unlike other assignments, I couldn't take a flight back, because I was already at home.”

Mr. Lima, who has spent much of his career covering conflicts and war, tried to to convey the size of the problem in his native Portugal, and “the lack of hope” that he found on long daily walks through Lisbon.

“I tried to give them, the people that I've met, at least dignity and respect when I held up the camera and pressed the button to capture an unpleasant scene,” he said.

Andrea Bruce, who won the first Chris Hondros Award last year, had a complex story to cover in Latvia, a country that has been heralded as a European success story. Four years ago, it was an economic basket case, but today some experts are hailing Latvia as demonstrating the healing properties of austerity measures. It laid off a third of its civil servants, and its economy has shrunk by more than 20 percent. This year, its economy grew by 5 percent, but that was not enough to improve the lot of the average Latvian.

Ms. Bruce found that residents in the capital, Riga, “still battle everyday corruption, disillusionment and a harsh economic climate.” Whereas in the countryside, she found that most people “live a very self-sufficient, farm-centered life.”

“People are private and rarely want something for free,” she wrote in an e-mail. “They value work, and they live with the belief that speaking out against the government or drawing attention to themselves doesn't help. Nearly a generation of Latvians were sent to Siberia or killed. The average person in Greece is more well-off than most Latvians, but Latvians rarely take to the streets.”

In the interactive published today, Ms. Daley wrote:

Over the past year, the countries hit hard est by the crisis -Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland - have struggled to bring down their debts. They have raised taxes, laid off workers, reduced services and charged for medical care that had been free for decades. Each country had its own formula. But they were joined in the misery of trying to make do on less - and then even less. No amount of cutting seemed to be enough. Businesses continued to fail at a rapid pace. Even those who thought they were safe lost their jobs. Those who had work saw their salaries reduced. Parents watched their children fly off to other countries looking for employment. Or welcomed them back to their childhood rooms because, unable to pay their own mortgages, they were losing their homes to foreclosures.

Andrea Bruce for T he New York Times A college-educated Latvia woman who lives with her brother and parents on their dairy farm just outside Cessis, Latvia, on Dec. 19.

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