The Table of Power 1

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In the project The Table of Power (1993–95), I was searching for a table that symbolized modern society’s most important value: economic power. Industrial multinational corporations are the most powerful commercial institutions of our time (the top ten in Europe had, at the time, a combined revenue of $524,731.8 million). They symbolize this power through their products, visible all over the world. I tried to map European society by photographing the most potent tables, the meeting tables of the boards of directors of Europe’s forty largest industrial multinational corporations according to the 1994 edition of Fortune’s Global 500 (Fortune’s Global 500 is a ranking of the top five-hundred corporations worldwide as measured by revenue, published annually by the American business magazine Fortune since 1990).