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September 2018

Don’t Look Away

Speech to the Museum of Social Justice’s annual Tardeada event, September 29, 2018.

The Brazilian economist-turned documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado said, “I have never put myself in a situation where I have a moral question about whether or not to photograph, such as ‘Do I have a right to photograph when the death is there in front of me, the suffering is there in front of me? ’I never ask these questions, because I asked myself the more important questions before I arrived there. Do we have the right to the division of resources that we have in the world?  Do I have the right to eat when others don’t eat?” This philosophy has informed my approach to documentary work from my college days, through my years working in Africa, on up to the present.

One of the biggest challenges when presuming to represent life’s various “marginalized” populations or communities, is not the act of seeing, or of wanting to be there, listening, watching, empathizing, commiserating, and collecting images and anecdotes. Ultimately it is in the editing, curation and display where the work is given form and context. This is why it has been a unique pleasure to work with the Museum of Social Justice staff and board members.

One of Us grew out of a collaboration with then-director Wade Trimmer of the SFVRM, who suggested that I visit sites where their mobile shower unit went in the early morning hours. From there it was a matter of gaining permission from the respective directors of MEND Poverty in San Fernando, North Valley Caring Services in North Hills, St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood, and the Living Praise Christian Church in Chatsworth, to introduce myself to those who would come to these facilities for breakfast, a shower, maybe some fresh clothing, and hopefully some supportive human contact. Asking them if they wanted to sit for portraits and interviews required gaining trust, and trying to reassure them that this was not just another variation on the media stereotyping that many of the people I spoke to were painfully wary of. Those who agreed to speak and sit for portraits tended to be among the people who sensed that their participation might help lead to some improvement in their condition, or a softening of the critical way society in general looks at them, and in so many cases, treats them as outcasts, even untouchables. I’m grateful to each one of these people, as well as the group of homeless friends along the 405 freeway in North Hills that I have become close with over the past few years , including Terry and Aimee, Lynda, Gracie, Craig, and a revolving cast of others who have come and gone, sometimes to prison, sometimes temporarily into shelter, sometimes just gone. Visiting them regularly on my bicycle, whether just hanging out and talking or documenting their endless survival strategies as they engaged in a cruel game of cat and mouse with law enforcement, was an education in itself. Witnessing their struggles with endemic poverty, their prospects of ever rising above their circumstances compromised by whatever mental, physical or dependence issues they were dealing with, I always leave their company with a profound sense of their humanity, even generosity of spirit. I often think of something Manny Flores told my students when they interviewed him: “I’ve come to realize that homelessness is like a disease. The longer you have it the harder it becomes to cure.” But that doesn’t make someone any less human. We all know people that have these same afflictions but are not homeless, and that this overgeneralization of equating the homeless with mental illness and addiction is a false equivalency.

With Manny Flores


I carried two books with me in 1987, when I moved to Kenya run the information department for an NGO called InterAid International; James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which still serves as a crucible and a vital check on one’s ego while engaged in advocacy work, and William Stott’s Documentary Expression in Thirties America. Stott wrote something that I would like to share: “That the world can be improved and yet must be celebrated as it is are contradictions. The beginning of maturity may be the recognition that both are true.”

This reminds me of Father Arnold Grol, a Roman Catholic parish priest and a fixture in Nairobi’s slums and streets for nearly 30 years, until his death at 73 in 1997. In 1975 he started the Undugu Society, an organization that still works today with the urban poor, and especially street children. From the time I arrived in Kenya and started photographing the street kids out of personal interest, we would cross paths occasionally in the streets and alleys, and I eventually joined forces with Undugu in 1992, running their Information Department during my last two years in Africa.

Fr. Grol was as comfortable in the alleys as I was; the difference being he was also at home in the boardrooms, involved in a lot of his own fundraising. He once told me, as we talked about the frustrations we shared at the lack of civic concern and empathy for the street kids, “The point where we have failed is that we have not involved the rich people; we have not made clear to those who have money, and especially big firms, that money is there to be a little bit equally distributed. I’m not against big salaries, but what I am against is that when you get the big salary you use it in order to buy your third or fourth car, your third or fourth house, or a private plane. In my own family, I’ve had people who only lived for money. I don’t know one of them who only lived for his personal pleasure and money that has become happy. Those who shared their big salaries– not giving half away, but a reasonable sum– they are the ones who are the happiest.”

Advocating on behalf of the street kids and others was an extraordinarily formative time in my life. The daily experiences, the endless frustrations tempered by the small victories and shared moments of humanity… I don’t think anyone in this room could feel any different than I did when a small barefoot girl, part of a gaggle of kids who were following me around near the city market one day, tapped me on my back and returned half of a mandarin I had just given her. Such a simple act, but one that puts to shame those with plenty who refuse to share. More frequently though I watched a loaf of bread fall in pieces to the ground as two ravenously hungry boys fought over it, or listened through the door in guilty horror as a group of boys were beaten in a police station after I reported them for breaking into the trunk of my car and stealing a laptop.

As I like to say, “don’t look away.” You never know when you will be able to reach someone and help them to a better place, or at least give them hope. That’s what Undugu did so well. One street girl named Mercy Gichengi was helped out of the particularly dangerous conditions and circumstances that the girls faced in the streets, and lived for a time in a home we rented in a rural village named Rioki. Years later as I was editing together the book on Africa (that is finally being printed), we reconnected on social media; I learned that after being helped through school, Mercy went all the way to higher education, and today she is involved in a number of development initiatives related to urban poverty and women. Mercy was kind enough to write something about her experiences for my book, the horrific details of which I decided not to include in this speech because I am still not able to read through them dry-eyed.

I couldn’t be prouder of anyone that I am of Mercy Gichengi today, and so happy to learn she rose above the conditions I was compelled to write editorials and other essays about, advocating for the protection of these children from government policies and the conditions in remand homes and prisons which directly violated not only the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but Kenya’s own Child Law Project Children’s Act.

So all of this informed my worldview when I moved back to Los Angeles in 1994, almost immediately drawn to Skid Row and other places where homelessness had taken hold. Photographing for the LA Reader, I met Ted Hayes in Justiceville, the utopian dome city that he had started in what is now the LA Live part of the city. His vision was overrun by economic realities, and looking back I think now that this was a squandered opportunity; his concept wasn’t embraced and replicated, instead it was allowed to fizzle out.

The criminalization of poverty is a recurring theme. During a particularly harsh raid of their encampment in North Hills in December 2016, orchestrated between city and county agencies, I received a text message from Gracie urging me to rush down to the freeway— which I did in time to see several of them in handcuffs, hauled off to the courts and prison system, only to gradually, one-by-one, return to the same location where they were supposedly banned from. An exercise in futility and shortsightedness…

I think it says a lot when I receive comments from old friends like John Muiruri, who was one of many selfless social workers at Undugu back in the day, responding a few days ago to a photograph I posted on social media, of a homeless woman holding a sign essentially begging for food and shelter: “It hurts to see people sleep outside and hungry while so much space is available.” This from a man who has worked for decades with street children and the dirt-poor residents of some of Africa’s most desolate slum communities. It’s sobering to recall how the people of Rioki welcomed those street girls into their village, and into their schools, with the headmaster telling me that they were excellent students, “just like any other children.” If only our NIMBY hard-liners could demonstrate the same open-heartedness to their less fortunate neighbors.

But here we are. In light of the fact that this city waited too long to tackle homelessness with the resources that are surely available, we cannot now depend on the real estate profiteers and political operatives under their sway to somehow fix an intractable problem that is essentially baked into the cake of our “ownership society,” and so it falls on everyone to pitch in, and watch in awe as outreach workers venture into the encampments to meet the dispossessed head on, and dedicated activists fight tooth and nail for every concession regarding bridge housing, safe parking, and other crumbs that fall slowly off the table.

I’ll finish with one more thought from Salgado, who declared that “The most interesting function of this kind of photography is exactly this: to show and to provoke debate and to see how we can go ahead with our lives. The photographer must participate in this debate.”Thank you to the Museum of Social Justice, to all the activists and other Change Agents, and to the members of the homeless community for giving me access and allowing me to participate in the debate, even though I tend to agree that “Humanitarian imagery,”as the historian Heide Fehrenbach has suggested, “is moral rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence.” With this in mind, I encourage everyone to read and listen to the stories in the One of Us collection with as much interest as you might study their faces and living conditions. Simply bringing these photographs to your attention is not enough—there’s no shortage of dramatic imagery of human suffering, and without their stories, these images are in my mind even less than moral rhetoric, they promote a brand of voyeurism and spectacle, even entertainment, that led the Kenyan author and social critic Binyavanga Wainaina to coin the term “poverty porn,”a phrase akin to the “poverty pimping”coined by Skid Row’s General Jeff Page to describe the well-meaning but misguided efforts being made to combat urban poverty and homelessness in Los Angeles. I often wonder how it would look to have the collective force of corporate philanthropy married to the most idealistic vision of social engineering possible.

Sep 30, 2018

May 2018

Play
May 23, 2018
Suburbanality

Even the stuffies are in bad shape out here on the hardscrabble sidewalks.

More of a chair than a bed. 405 on-ramp at Nordhoff, nobody’s home(less)

May 12, 2018
The Chronic

SURVIVING THE ELEMENTS

In spite of the efforts of concerned governmental agencies, private institutions and individuals, the vast majority of the homeless population in Los Angeles fend for themselves outdoors. They live on the streets and in alleys, alongside freeway off-ramps and under bridges, sleeping in makeshift structures or bushes outdoors, in vehicles, shelters, abandoned buildings or parks. Simple things we take for granted, such as cleaning clothes, or finding indoor plumbing for washing and relieving oneself, present constant challenges. At a certain point, they become what is known as the “chronically homeless,” seeking out a patchwork of social services to meet their health care and nutritional needs; the prospect of finding transitional or affordable housing for most is an elusive goal. Day after day, they face public indifference, or worse, derision. The possibility of being ticketed, arrested, assaulted or robbed is part of everyday reality. Personal possessions, including medications and sentimental items are subject to confiscation at the whim of city and county agencies or political expediency. The general degradation and constant stress of having to navigate their survival in this environment only serves to exacerbate existing addictions, mental and physical illnesses.

Some band together in communal encampments, sharing their struggles, gains and losses, steeling themselves against those among them who are subsumed by their vices. So it is with a group I began documenting in mid-2016, surviving under and around the 405 freeway overpass at Nordhoff in North Hills. From one day to the next their makeshift tents and hovels would move from one spot to another along the on- and off-ramps, in an endless game of cat-and-mouse with authorities. A supporting cast of characters came and went, but those at the center of this clique became my friends and confidantes, to the point where they saw me as someone they could vent and share their frustrations with. On better days, the talk would be optimistic, the low flame of their hopes and dreams flickering back to life. Over the course of several months I witnessed, often with a sense of despair, their attempts to achieve some sense of normalcy.

At the scene of a raid in December 2016 which resulted in the arrest and incarceration of Lynda, Craig, Gracie, Terry, Amie and others, a young LAPD officer remarked that he and his fellow HOPE officers were like “social workers with guns.” That most of those arrested that day continue to be engaged in survival tactics in this same location raises questions about not necessarily the intention but the efficacy of the efforts being made to do more than simply criminalize those having the most difficulty rising above their plight, or just want to be left alone.

After two years of a mostly friendly and cooperative relationship with this group, I was left with more questions than answers. What is the point at which a human being ceases to matter? We find so many who seem at face value to be their own worst enemies; have they forfeited their right to assistance? Where may a person’s individual right to liberty be impeded by state or community intervention? Should those who are unwilling or – perhaps affected by substance abuse and/or mental instability –unable to proactively seek relief, be subject to the uncertainty of not having a safe haven to stake a claim on what is left of their lives? How does our society feel about the confrontational relationships with law enforcement that result from the inevitable intransigence on both sides, when the compassion training officers might receive to help deal with society’s outliers breaks down?

May 4, 2018
#homeless #oneofus #equalitymovement143

April 2018

Solution denied...

Ted Hayes, 1994 

The activism of Theodore “Ted” Hayes, Jr. began in January 1985, when Justiceville, a community of homeless people in Los Angeles, was founded. It survived for five months, until authorities shut down the shantytown. Hayes entered 35-day fast in protest in response. In 1987, with producer Tom Bolema and the Butchers, he recorded “Ted’s Rap: Justiceville” about the bulldozing of the encampment.

From this evolved The Dome Village community, officially opened in November of 1993 with a $250,000 grant from ARCO. Located in downtown Los Angeles, the 20 Omni-sphere domes were a working prototypical model, key to a comprehensive plan designed to “break the cycle” of homelessness, optimistically named the Exodus, Genesis, Incentive, Initiative Plan (EGIIP).

Rosa Vasquez and her two children at Genesis I.


“’The idea was to create a family environment…. We recognized that people needed to be in a social environment, but they needed a private space,’ Hayes told the Los Angeles Times. Residents, who paid $70 to $100 a month, were responsible for chores and could buy and cook their own food in a communal kitchen dome. Other domes housed washrooms and laundry facilities. Also on site was a dome for a library containing computers with Internet access.” 

Photo origin unknown

The project received worldwide acclaim for its innovative concept and proposal for dealing with global homelessness. Attracting attention nationally and internationally, the Dome Village received visits from HRH Prince Edward of England, the Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum as well as government and business dignitaries from various parts of the world.  

In February 1998 Hayes delivered to the White House his proposal for the creation of a National Homeless Plan to eradicate homelessness in the next ten years. In October of 1998 the City Council of Los Angeles, and in January of 1999 the County passed resolutions in support of the plan. But by November of 2007, the Dome Village was closed due to political and economic obstacles that Ted, his staff and supporters could not overcome. An article in the Los Angeles Times published on October 29, 2006, explained:

“Dome Village had paid $2,500 a month for the 1 ¼ acres, not including property taxes, said founder Ted Hayes, a longtime homeless activist who lived in a dome. But last year, one of the owners, Milton Sidley, wrote to Hayes, saying the overall rent would increase to more than $18,300 a month.

That spelled the end of Dome Village.

‘The property in downtown Los Angeles has appreciated such a great deal at this point,“ said Mike Sidley, Milton Sidley’s son and attorney for the partnership that owns the land. ‘It’s just no longer economically viable to allow them to remain there.’

The dismantling of Dome Village – near the Staples Center – ended an era of experimentation in which Hayes tried to give homeless people their own haven away from skid row.” 

Skid Row, 1994

Apr 28, 2018
#homeless #oneofus #skidrow
Apr 22, 2018
#oneofus #skidrow #homeless #losangeles #urban poverty
Apr 18, 2018
Play
Apr 9, 2018
#shedoes #oneofus
Quarantined

Back for the third time in four days, I spoke with an employee of the Thai restaurant who told me Jimmy (the owner) has struck a deal of mutual convenience with our friend– free meals as long as Craig keeps to the back of the ramp, out of eyesight of customers. Craig is now in terrible shape, with the combination of drug addiction, staph infection and general societal dissociation rendering him psychologically fragile– yesterday (the day after I took these photographs) I returned there on my bike and found him raging, to the point where he started rubbing his infected hands all over by bicycle, a surprisingly hostile move from a guy who has always been friendly until now. Paramedic units have been called but did not find him there upon arrival. Seems like he is generally quarantining himself from Gracie and the others, now also back in the forbidden zone…

Apr 4, 2018
Play
Apr 1, 2018

March 2018

Mar 31, 2018
Mar 29, 2018
Mar 28, 2018
Mar 24, 2018 1 note
Mar 23, 2018
Mar 22, 2018
Same as it ever was
Mar 21, 2018
#oneofus  homeless
“...still poor...” (but rich in heart)

Dori Sill has been in her new, Los Angeles Family Housing-subsidized apartment for over a month now. She’s gradually getting her things out of storage and putting the pieces of her life back together.

Her small apartment is filling up with the vintage furniture and artifacts that were once taken for granted, back in her salad days…

Her career and lifestyle as a professional musician now in the distant past, Dori hopes to put her arsenal of guitars and keyboards back to work… Now in her early 60s, it may be her best chance to earn a living on her own, as the aneurysm and coma which left her physically hobbled makes it a strain to even climb the stairs to her second-story apartment.

Max, Dori’s constant canine companion during the homeless years, recently passed away, but Dori still has two large cats to keep her company.

No longer homeless “but still poor,” Dori takes her lunch each Saturday at the Hope of Valley in Van Nuys, among dozens of others in various stages of homelessness and impoverishment.

Mar 17, 2018
#lafh #homeless #oneofus
Mar 16, 2018
Corners and gutters

One lasting sensation from today’s bike ride was the reminder that outdoors, even on a moderate, not-yet-cool late-afternoon in March, the blast of warmth that comes from the tumbling dryers when you pass or enter the open door of a laundromat is comforting, when not a reminder of what you no longer have access to. The not-so-homeless Colonel is back on the ramp, he who survives entirely on socialist subsistence programs and the kindness of strangers (as though those two things should be mutually exclusive in cases of dire need)?

The Colonel has seen them all come and go, and still knows the whereabouts of a few, or who might have last been camping on a local sidestreet. Now 80, he has worked the off-ramps of the 405 for woe these many years while shacked up in a motel room along the strip on Sepulveda Blvd. The Colonel still has the glint in his eye as he recounts surviving many health challenges, even as he must now cart around the oxygen that keeps him afloat.

This gentle soul will converse with a friendly stranger… he expresses his lamentations in abrupt tones… one of those that are said to not want to accept the offer of a shelter bed, has worn out his welcome, or prefers to scratch out a meager life in the margins.  

Mar 7, 2018

February 2018

Ghostly traces...

…of Gracie and Craig, Terry and Amie, Lynda and the others who plied their trades and tried their luck and laid their head and money on the dirty ground to weather the weather whether or not they might be a number in a homeless count counting their blessings for Hope not hopelessness and domicile deprived not homeless…

Community pride…. The off ramps and underpasses are back, well let’s say order has been restored. The old gang is pretty much broken up and dispersed by now… not too many happy endings, hardly any down here in fact. Funny thing is, they chased the people away but the detritus remains unattended to by any and all who were advocating for a “cleanup” of the neighborhood.

Feb 14, 2018
Synchronicity

Synchronicity… worlds meet at the 2nd Annual Homeless Initiative Conference, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Feb. 8th… Sheila Kuehl of the LA County Board of Supervisors brought our friend Dori in front of the 500 participants, and related her story. Dori was somewhat bemused by the attention, but  much more relaxed and happy now that LAFH has provided her with shelter. 

The event organizers asked to display some of the One of Us art, including this one of Manuel Flores, Community Liaison for the North Valley Caring Services. 

Feb 10, 2018
#nvcs #northvalleycaringservices #lacounty #homeless
Inspired Eye (interview)
Feb 8, 2018
Feb 3, 2018
#homeless #skid row #housing #affordable housing
Feb 1, 2018

January 2018

Dori

daveblume:

When I first met and spoke with Dori last August at the St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood, the most enduring impression was her cheerfulness in the face of great hardship. As her story printed below testifies, Dori’s life was shattered by a tragic fate, a brain aneurism which derailed her dreams, put her at death’s door, and still affects her physically and otherwise…   

Revisiting Dori’s story today, after finally locating her cluttered but homey RV (a camper shell) parked for now on a residential North Hollywood street, I’m struck by how little she talked about her early career in music. She had told me about a song she had once written that was included in a high-profile movie soundtrack, but not much more. Today she shared an old CD which contained that song and five other well-written and produced tracks, recorded by the band she sang and played keyboards in. The music is lovely, her voice sweet and strong. As she sang along with the CD, it was still her song, still her voice. Dori also took out an old 11x14 portfolio that held several high-quality black and white portraits of her in those salad days, portraits of a beautiful and sensitive artist. There were also pictures taken with Rick James, Gary Wright and other luminaries of that era. Most surprising, among the memorabilia stuffed in the side pockets of the portfolio, was a card (a love letter really) written to her by Prince. It’s envelope also held a color Polaroid of Dori and the legend, taken sometime in the late-70s before he hit superstardom. She mused about selling it to some collector, but seems to have decided that in spite of her dire straits, it’s not worth it. 

“Because of my aneurism I might forget some of the things you ask me, My name is Dori, my age is 58. Before I had a brain aneurism, I owned a spa called the Oasis Day Spa in Studio City and we did facials, massage, nails. I had about ten employees and I was working about eight days a week. And I think the stress of it all just got to my head. One night I was working in my studio at home and writing music and then I suddenly started to feel lightheaded so I went down to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and I saw this black blood that was under my skin and I had white circles through my eyes, then I just fainted and then went in a coma from that point.

I was in the hospital when I woke up … I came out of that stroke and was like ‘okay I have to get back to work.’ You know, I was telling everybody I’ve got to get to my spa because I just started it four years prior and I really wanted it to do well. And it was, and I was very busy that day, so my receptionist kept calling me and she said you always answer the phone so what’s the matter with you Dori?  So she came to my house and found me in bed with the two dogs next to the bed lying there and I couldn’t move so she called the ambulance and they took me into the hospital and said that I was experiencing a brain aneurism.

Actually I could talk or think about what people were saying but I couldn’t respond. So that was what the scene was all about for three weeks. They were going to take me off life support and then Greg, my ex-husband, came up to me and said Dori, I want you to know that it’s okay if you go but if you want you can stay. But they are going to take you off life support so you need come to and give me a sign that you are going to come to so I squeezed his hand and he said ‘I think she’s awake come on in,’ and they all came running in saying ‘yep she’s out of the coma,’ so get it out so we can get her going.

Now I didn’t have my business because it had died probably a couple months before I was out of the coma because they just didn’t know how to keep it running you know, which I understand. So that died and then I had a house that was going to have to be put up for sale, which I went bankrupt on. So I went into bankruptcy from that, and then I got an apartment, which I could afford because I was babysitting dogs on the side too as well as getting money from the government.

And then the rents went up and from there I lived in a house on Irvine. For six years I rented a room and he let my dogs in and let me do music and everything so it was fine but then he decided he wanted to sell the house. And when he sold the house, looking at rents and stuff and how much they are, it was so expensive I couldn’t afford it. So I got an RV. And that’s where I live now, in the RV. Since probably, six months now. The police say that neighbors are complaining occasionally because I was living with a guy that we’d fight a lot. And so he’s gone now thank God. I got a ticket the other day for being there for more than three days because the police had come. 

I love the homeless people that I meet. To me it’s like another family you know, it’s a good family and the food is good that we get too because we can go to different places everyday and get fed. So that’s helpful. I’ve never been homeless, I never ever thought I would even be in this position. I get money from the government. Every month I get like $889 for disability. And then I’ll house-sit on the side and (watch) animals you know, which brings in a little cash. And that’s really what I live on. Six hundred of it is already spent with the storage that I have and that kind of thing.

My family, both my parents died and my sisters, one lives in Nashville and the other one I’m not sure where she lives. They don’t even know. Because I don’t know if they know how expensive rents are …

Yeah it would be nice if I could write a hit song, that would be good. That’s about what I want to do now. And I have a whole studio setup. I’m trying to get the electricity so I can plug it in and work on my keyboards. But I’ve got 15 songs that I wrote on my own that are pretty good.”

AFTER TWO YEARS OF BEING HOMELESS, LOS ANGELES FAMILY HOUSING FINALLY MOVED DORI INTO A ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN VAN NUYS. Activist Laura Rathbone, most instrumental in moving the process along, recounted the saga in a Facebook post January 19, 2018.

Jan 20, 2018 4 notes
In the first person

I picked this sign up outside a 7-11 along my regular bike route today. Folded and tucked under my arm, it was a symbol of abject poverty and marginalization, so I anticipated or channeled a measure of resentment and pity. I detected a mini-gamut of reactions, from the grim smile to the grim encouraging smile (more eyes), or being ignored outright. (So many people frown these days out in public so I couldn’t gauge a difference from my usual rides). 

In spite of and because of the ratty condition and the felt marker mix of upper and lower case italicized san serif lettering, it will become a piece of documentary evidence, an indictment or an artifact, either way a receipt littered on the ground elevated to the status of Art in the service of social justice. 

Pedaling into the late afternoon sun with Bob Dylan philosophizing in my ears, it was just a reminder, a pinprick, more than it was a meaningful experience…. Reports abound that it costs $2000 to some guy named Mike to experience professional or recreational slumming. Such naked voyeurism evokes Binyavanga Wainaina’s poverty porn sentiments on patronage and exploitation. 

Jan 17, 2018
#homeless
Look (and listen)

Well you know there’s that lingering guilt about turning a person’s disadvantage into an artwork, with the whole notion of context thrown up for grabs. Displaying their words, as they shared them, hopefully helps to recontextualize the portraits … This project used to be called One of Us

Jan 8, 2018
It’s a Hard Knock Life

daveblume:

I used to bump into Lydia and her partners on Broadway Street during the years 2007-2009. Big Gulp cups of liquor took the edge off life on Skid Row, and they’d move up to Broadway Street when they preferred to pass the day somewhere less violent.

Consoling one another while talking about a fire that had destroyed most of their possessions.

Evelyn demonstrates a stabbing they witnessed on Skid Row earlier that day.

Lydia and another friend.

Jan 6, 2018 2 notes
Entitlement failure

“’Humanitarian imagery,’ the historian Heide Fehrenbach suggested, ‘is moral rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence.” (63)

Amie and Terry are caught in an unforgiving phalanx of substance abuse and poverty. January 6, 2018

“In fifty years much of Western society has inched toward a public-service-lite ‘hollow state,’ a term used to describe a society, most pronounced in the United States and Britain, where the state withdraws from primary responsibility for public-service provision. The move in this direction is based up ‘trickle-down’ economic theory and the belief that self-regulating markets will solve social problems with minimal care in the community.” (66)

“In 1975, more than a quarter of the British population were living in or on the margins of poverty. However, discovering this as a process—explaining why many people remained in poverty—proved more challenging, as the photographers discovered: ‘To document a condition is not to explain it. The condition is a symptom, not a cause; more precisely, it is the outcome of a process.’ The Survival Programmes photographs in themselves were, ultimately, unable to develop a narrative that entirely succeeded in explaining inner-city poverty, although the interviews helped. They hinted at a sort of self-perpetuating ‘culture of poverty’ exacerbated by families unprepared for the form of social change that the political class deemed to be good for them.” (68)

“Documentary photographers committed to exploring the condition of those living in poverty have struggled to understand its nature.” (68)

“Many of the issues that photographers have sought to address in the medium’s first 150 years have been driven by outrage at various forms of what the economist Amartya Sen calls entitlement failure. Sen used the term to imply that problems faced by the poor were not necessarily of their own making. His context was famine, but the same thinking might easily be applied to landlessness, drug addiction, domestic violence, poverty, foreclosure and inner-city housing.” (69)

All excerpts from the 2016 book The Documentary Impulse, by Stuart Franklin.

Jan 6, 2018
Jan 5, 2018

December 2017

Play
Dec 24, 2017

November 2017

Seeking other perspectives...

“Whenever we want to write principles of ethics and there is a major differential between the powerful and the suffering, then the weakest are the optimum test of rightness or wrongness … the challenge for us who are interested in intercultural communication is to say how we can articulate an ethics that enables us to actually make the minority, or the weak or the suffering, the optimum standard.”

* Clifford Christians

Nov 22, 2017
Play
Nov 7, 2017
#homeless #csun #oneofus

September 2017

Unworthy?

Does God only help those who help themselves? What is the point at which a human being ceases to matter….we find so many who seem at face value to be their own worst enemies; have they forfeited their right to assistance? Where may a person’s individual right to liberty be impeded by state or community intervention? Should those who are unwilling or– perhaps affected by substance abuse and/or mental instability– unable to proactively seek relief, be subject to the uncertainty of not having a safe haven to stake their claim on what is left of their lives? How does our society feel about the confrontational relationships with law enforcement that result from the inevitable intransigence on both sides, when the compassion training officers might receive to help deal with society’s outliers breaks down? 

At the scene of an encampment raid which resulted in several arrests and incarcerations, a young LAPD officer remarked that he and his fellow HOPE officers were “social workers with guns.” That most of those arrested that day have been engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with authorities in the same location since that incident (of last December) raises questions about not necessarily the intention but the efficacy of the effort there. In the media, the urban poverty and homeless problem has devolved into a dystopian morality play. Unmediated, it is laden with harshness. That is why it is so good to find so many well-intended, even passionate people working on untying this most Gordian of knots.

Sep 30, 2017
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Sep 28, 2017 1 note
#homeless #poverty #one of us #panhandling
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Sep 24, 2017
#homeless #homelessness #oneofus #lafamilyhousing
another day, another struggle

Maria maintains her appearance the best she can in the harsh street conditions.

Terry and Amy in the midst of a protracted argument with a young couple who claim that the dog she has been keeping was actually stolen from them….

Sep 9, 2017
#homeless #oneofus #social justice

August 2017

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Aug 26, 2017
#homeless #homelessnes #confiscation #sanitation #artist #artwork #oneofus #socialjustice
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Aug 18, 2017 1 note
#homeless #drug addiction #oneofus
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Aug 11, 2017
#homeless #musician #streetmusician #jurisdiction #oneofus
It’s a Hard Knock Life

I used to bump into Lydia and her partners on Broadway Street during the years 2007-2009. Big Gulp cups of liquor took the edge off life on Skid Row, and they’d move up to Broadway Street when they preferred to pass the day somewhere less violent.

Consoling one another while talking about a fire that had destroyed most of their possessions.

Evelyn demonstrates a stabbing they witnessed on Skid Row earlier that day.

Lydia and another friend.

Aug 11, 2017 2 notes
#homeless #broadway #losangeles #oneofus
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Aug 10, 2017 1 note
#homeless #injustice #criminalization #poverty #oneofus
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Aug 9, 2017
#homeless #injustice #caltrans #california #oneofus
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Aug 5, 2017
#homeless #activism #grassroots #equalitymovement #one of us
Skid Row in the 1990s

So the city couldn’t see this coming?

So the city couldn’t see this coming?

So the city couldn’t see this coming?

So the city couldn’t see this coming?

So the city couldn’t see this coming?

Aug 3, 2017
#skidrow #skid row #homeless #losangeles #oneofus
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Aug 2, 2017

July 2017

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Jul 18, 2017
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Jul 18, 2017

May 2017

academically, there is no easy way to say this...


May 23, 2017
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