The Publics

Colors Magazine (often confused with Color, a skate mag produced out of Vancouver’s Railtown district) is essentially the propaganda wing of The Benetton Family, who own and operate numerous clothing brands including United Colors of Benetton and Killer Loop. If you can suspend your disbelief for a moment and view the magazine not as one giant Benetton advertisement and focus on its exceptional editorial content, Colors is one of the few magazines on the rack actually worth its asking price ($10). The latest issue, which opens with the sentence “Money is an illusion, a psychological relationship between an object and a value that has been given to it”, is an impressive achievement in content & design semblance that makes your average periodical look grotesquely unsophisticated in comparison.

The theme of the issue is as follows: Benetton analyzed paper money in one of their laboratories and found traces of certain substances, the most common being: cocaine, oil, blood, soil, sweat, feces and so on. They then conducted a bit of research and documented different locations/cultures where these substances are being used as a subsitute for monetary currency. For example: in Colombia you can pay your medical bills with cocaine, while in Iraq there exists a thriving black market for blood.

The end product is a visually engrossing piece of photojournalism that serves up multiple hypothesis through which the idea of “money” is explored. The issue also includes various interviews, facts and figures which are supplemented by references to informative on-line resources. Web sites mentioned worth checking out include:

The Drug War Clock

Investors Against Genocide

Worldmapper

No Dirty Gold

CARMA: Carbon Monitoring For Action