The Real Crisis in Europe (in pictures)

This is getting weird.

Spiegel is running an interesting story about the incredible challenges faced by a certain profession during the Euro debt crisis. Politicians? Bankers? Accountants? Of course not. This drawn out downspiral has most drastically affected photographers:

Stratenschulte is a photographer with the German news agency DPA. He has been photographing euro coins from various angles for the past three years. He tries to convey the complex crisis in images. The problem is that the crisis won't end, which means Stratenschulte has to keep coming up with fresh ideas. 

His colleagues have resorted to using children's toys, arranging a plastic shark to look like it's eating a Lego man holding a Greek flag. They have photographed coins in a free fall. Rumor has it that one photographer poured gasoline on coins to try to make them glow with heat.

The problem is capturing in photographs something which cannot be photographed - purely abstract economic occurrences. I personally prefer the pictures of Merkel and other important people looking angry or friendly while sitting in rooms full of fine wood furniture. It captures the actual events that are happening, but it does of course leave out the immense ramifications of those events. A burning Euro coin does help bring home (at least for Europeans) how critical the shifts are, but to foreign viewers it is a picture of a piece of metal on fire. I never found it very moving.

Be sure to flip through the slideshow and read the humorous captions.