Yes, they are stories, crafted stories. These are neither "real" nor "raw," but appear to recycle very familiar stereotypes. Looks like Laita can't stop being an advertiser.

To me the photos are still 'beautiful'. Perhaps it's his choice of models.

It took me a minute to get the first pair, but then I realized that he's calling the woman a "gold digger." At which point I had basically the same reaction as Stephanie.. Oh, he's trying to be provocative and cutesy, but isn't actually being original or thoughtful about it.

It is interesting to see who's smiling, though.. I wonder if he chose the subjects' facial expressions or if he let them? The marine is the only one really smiling, which is at odds with our usual impression of them (as stoic and serious). The homeless man could be smiling, but it's hard to tell, and the lingerie model has a hint of a smile.. I kind of wish he'd asked her to pose in a more natural position, because the tilt of her hips and "come hither" expression are so typical of models that it really makes her portrait uninteresting. It would have been a better juxtaposition to have her mirroring the other woman's posture or otherwise "slouching" or relaxing. Unless the point is that she's "always on display"...

The woman in the bar and the gold prospector are also a dubious comparison. They're both gold-diggers! Ha! But the woman is well-dressed, presumably because of her success in spending her partners' money, while the more "honest" prospector is poorly dressed, implying he gains little personal profit from his efforts to find the material that will end up around the necks of women like the one he is being compared to.

I can't help but notice the gender pattern here. All of the professional roles are portayed by men, and the grittier the job, the gruffier the man (except possibly the janitor). As notede before, the first woman could be read as a golddigger, but eve if that's not the intent, both she and the fur lady are consumers of what the gruffy men produce. The girdle ladu could also be seen as a consumer of lingerie, but of course what they're showing in that case isn't the producer (possibly female as well), but the eye candy model. If you look even deeper, you could see it as her being the idea of "ugly" against the idea of "beautiful", prepoducing the idea of women being either perfect or abysmal in every way.

Oy, I'm not impressed by any depth or insight in Laita's work. People with money and power suck, and people who work with their hands are exploited! Oh, and war is bad. Gosh, did you come up with that all on your own?

So, there's the 'abortionist' and the guy who comes by to pick up all the dead fetuses once a week?

Yeah, I really hate these. They don't contribute anything new or interesting to either the art world or the realm of social commentary. They're just lazy.

I like the portraits but a lot of the juxtapositions are trite and if they are meant as social commentary they make an unfair one.

I also note that 'abortionist' is a derogatory term.

So glad to see this negative reaction to these photos. The juxtapositions are so trite.

I love when fashion/ad people think they're being deep by shooting black and white, sharp-focused images that address "issues". They think they're so important because they freed themselves from producing the garbage they're used to making.

Wow, it's sad all you snide commenters can't appreciate art and constantly feel the need to criticize. You moan and complain about everything. If you've created a better more thought provoking set of pictures post it and prove it, otherwise stop being so harsh. Dickfaced hippies

You know, I grew up in the very far north in Canada, and actually knew people who trapped as a way of life. They were not grizzled old white guys dressed up like Davey Crockett threw up on them.

i guess i had a different thought about the abortion provider and the... i don't know what people who carry our garbage prefer to be called... sanitation worker? '
i suppose both jobs are pretty undesirable to have. i'm proudly pro-choice but i get the sense from many other people that the subject of abortion is something we don't really feel comfortable talking about in polite society, as is our garbage. most abortions are hidden from the people we know, just like how we package up our household waste in bags and pay other people to take it away while we look in the other direction. they're both pretty thankless jobs, as well. it might be that the photographer was not equating fetuses to human waste, though that is the first thought that comes to mind.
regardless, however, all these juxtapositions are pretty trite and cliché to my mind. if i had the artistic skill as a twelve-year-old i probably would have come up with something similar.

I kind of like the comparison between the abortionist and the garbageman. If only abortionists were no more controversial than garbagemen. Come on, they do the same job!

How much money does an abortionist make?

Also, I didn't realize there are still gold prospectors and fur trappers these days. And if there aren't, you can't really say you're making any kind of relevant social commentary photographing models dressed up as them, can you?

Yes, yes, war veterans are always old white men with psychical disabilities. That's not a trite old stereotype at all. Then again, I have no idea what he's going for with that. It's not like the marine isn't also a white man. Maybe it's supposed to be some before and after thing.

We have a funny tendency, when looking at sharp, contrasty B&W photos or videos, to approach them as "highbrow," some rarefied or timeless high art. We're trained to subconsciously expect more depth and importance than we would from a Polaroid. But the medium isn't always the message we think it is.

This photo series is basically MTV to me; in fact, I could've sworn I was looking at stills from an irony-heavy 1990s Pearl Jam video. It's artificial by design; it's Pop. Rather than containing any ideas with depth or subtlety, it uses familiar patterns and iconography to stimulate immediate base reactions and seize upon our emotions. Like a Lady Gaga song, or a newspaper comic strip, or a sitcom. Being so assertively in that genre, it deserves to be criticized as pop. Why do we celebrate (or at least forgive) the staginess and spectacle and artificiality of Lady Gaga while attacking it in the static art of her contemporaries? What makes us decide which kind of pop artists are allowed to tell hollow, simplistic stories with our outdated symbols and which ones aren't?

I just wish I could go through and "like" all the comments.

The homeless guy is smoking, jeez, with what he spends on cigarettes he could have a decent place to live. And the Woman in Bar is not a gold digger. She's not attractive to enough for that, at best she is a bar fly, "working" for free drinks.

In a few years, after she blows all her money on... well blow, the Lingerie Model probably will be a gold digger.

Most of these annoyed me. I did like the Janitor/Comapny President one, mostly because the men look so similar that it sort of makes a point, albeit a not-so-thoughtful one.

I think there might be something in the fur one, specifically, the use of furs to indicate both semi-barbarism and aristocratic luxury, illustrating the dependence of cultural signifiers upon context.

I think it's possible to read the "abortionist vs. garbageman" in a more nuanced way. If you assume a pro-choice framework, then they both become (likely) unpleasant jobs that are nonetheless important services that "somebody's gotta do." Superficially, for bestowing a higher class position the abortion provider appears more "respected," but this contrasts with the perception of some people that performing abortions is immoral or shameful, but collecting refuse, though less "immediately prestigious" nonetheless deserves respect as a core example of "honest work."

It is funny to see the comments on here about Mark Laita's work, and how cliche and obvious they say his Created Equal is, when their comments say otherwise. If it was truly boring or contrived, it wouldn't cause you to write a paragraph on the subject. It's obvious that it has been done before, which in any case nowadays everything has already been explored to a certain extent so it's rather pointless to even say so.
Artwork in general can be interpreted in different ways, even if Mark Laita was putting his own views into his work (which all artists do anyway), even if it was incredibly obvious, as you all say, a viewer could see something different.
Personally I found the diptychs posted on here to be his most obvious on purpose, whoever posted perhaps intended that more people could pick up the correlation between the diptychs, I however find his other diptychs to be more interesting (and they are the less provocative ones).
To assume his work is all the same also shows those who post negatively lack some intelligence, they automatically assume his work is obvious without actually having any knowledge of the entire collection of diptychs, nor his other work.