This choice is methodological, not nostalgic.
Standard photovoice gives participants cameras at the start of a research process and asks them to document their world. We invert this sequence. Cameras are given after an initial in-depth interview, with a specific prompt: photograph the tensions between how your life appears and how it is actually experienced.
Participants keep the camera for two weeks. Then we meet again — this time to develop the film together and analyze the images in a return interview.
No metadata. Smartphone photos carry GPS coordinates, timestamps, and device IDs. For communities navigating stigma and institutional visibility concerns, this is not a trivial issue.
Intentionality. With only 27 frames, every shot is a decision. The scarcity creates a different relationship to the act of photographing — more deliberate, more considered.
The ritual of development. There is something irreversible about a disposable camera. You cannot delete. You cannot preview. The act of developing the film — waiting, not knowing — adds a dimension of encounter with one’s own images that digital photography eliminates.
Democratizing the gaze. The disposable camera is a familiar, non-intimidating object. It does not signal expertise or equipment. In research settings where power imbalances are already significant, this matters.
We are not asking about poverty. We are asking about appearance and experience — about the gap between how a household presents itself to the world and how daily life is actually felt. This framing allows participants to engage with their own situation without the stigma that poverty language carries.
The photographs, analyzed together in the return interview, become a third voice in the conversation — neither the researcher’s interpretation nor the participant’s verbal account, but something that emerged from their own deliberate gaze.
]]>Vulnerability describes a prospective condition — the risk of falling below a threshold in the future. A household is vulnerable if, given a particular shock (job loss, illness, economic recession), it is likely to fall into poverty. Vulnerability is about exposure to risk.
Crucially, vulnerability is something the system could see if it looked forward. It is a measurement challenge, not a structural blind spot.
Hidden poverty describes a present condition — a multidimensional deprivation that is already happening, above the official poverty threshold, and unrecognized by the system or often by the household itself.
Hidden poverty is not about risk. It is about a current state of economic, social, psychosocial, and symbolic deprivation that the official classification system does not capture because the household’s Sisbén score or income level places them “above” poverty.
Social protection systems are designed to address visible poverty. The logic is: identify who is poor → deliver resources → reduce poverty.
Hidden poverty breaks this logic entirely. These households are not identified as poor. They are above the targeting threshold. They do not receive support. And because their deprivation is multidimensional and often internalized as personal failure rather than structural exclusion, they rarely advocate for themselves.
The policy implication is significant: if we design systems only for visible poverty and vulnerability, we systematically exclude a population whose deprivation is real, present, and growing — particularly in middle-income urban contexts like Bogotá, where the cost of maintaining appearances compounds the material deprivation.
One of the most striking features of hidden poverty is that the households themselves often do not recognize their situation as poverty. The cultural script of the Colombian middle class — the ethic of self-sufficiency, the shame of caída social (social descent) — produces households that perform non-poverty even to themselves. This is not false consciousness. It is an adaptive strategy in a social environment where poverty carries stigma. Understanding this is essential for designing research — and policy — that can actually reach them.
]]>Sisbén IV assigns every registered household a composite score based on observable indicators: housing conditions, access to services, educational levels, asset ownership, and employment characteristics. The score runs from 0 to 100. Households below certain thresholds (varying by program) are eligible for social transfers.
The C09 threshold — the upper boundary of the “C” group — is particularly significant. Households above C09 are officially classified as non-poor and excluded from most social protection programs.
ILSIS (Índice de Localización de los Sistemas de Información Social) is a territorial aggregation index produced by the Secretaría Distrital de Integración Social (SDIS) in Bogotá. It aggregates household-level Sisbén data to the block and UPZ scale, creating a territorial index of social conditions.
The combination of Sisbén IV individual scores and ILSIS territorial aggregation is meant to provide a comprehensive picture of need. But this combination produces a structural blind spot.
Households that are above the C09 threshold but experiencing multidimensional deprivation are invisible in both systems:
The result: 193,406 households in Bogotá that our analysis identifies as experiencing hidden poverty are invisible at the UPZ scale in the combined Sisbén IV + ILSIS system.
This is not a measurement error. It is a structural effect produced by specific design decisions — the choice of threshold, the choice of aggregation unit, the choice of indicators. Design decisions that made perfect sense for addressing visible poverty, and that systematically fail for hidden poverty.
The institutional invisibility is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in specific UPZs — particularly Teusaquillo, Galerías, Los Cedros, and Quinta Paredes — where stratum 3–4 households with above-threshold Sisbén scores experience significant hidden deprivation.
These are not the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá. They are, in many cases, neighborhoods associated with the middle class. That is precisely the point.
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