Wealth Management

Carlos Spottorno's artist's book poses as a sales brochure for the fictitious WTF Bank, using black-and-white images of polo matches, ski trips, and glass-walled offices to picture the one-percent lifestyle that private wealth management quietly protects.

Wealth management, in banking terms, is the practice of helping the already rich get richer through tax strategy, legal planning, and financial advice bundled for a fee, often through offshore structures that keep both the money and its movements out of public view. Spottorno's 33 black-and-white photographs, captioned like a glossy prospectus and finished with gold embossing, adopt the visual language of private banking marketing to make that invisibility legible: polo, skiing, boardrooms, and the discreet infrastructure of a class whose wealth compounds largely unseen. The project grew out of a fictional Ferrari advertisement for the same imaginary WTF Bank that appeared on the back cover of Spottorno's earlier Economist-styled photobook The Pigs.

Published jointly by Editorial RM and PHREE in an edition of 1,000, with a separate collector's edition, the book extends Spottorno's documentary practice of using the format and design language of financial and news media against itself.