Entitlement failure

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

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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)

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

Homeless artist Lynda Zazanis talks a little about her approach to nail polish painting…

Seeking other perspectives…

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“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

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Students of the J410 Investigative Reporting class at California State University, Northridge listen to and engage with guest speakers Patrick Shibuya, Los Angeles City Attorney’s office; Gracie Crilley, homeless representative; Sean Dinse, Senior Lead Officer, Topanga Division, and Laura Rathbone, Equality Movement143.

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? 

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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.

Kathy gives a little insight into the panhandling life….

Gracie Crilley, 67, avoided the latest encampment sweep In North Hills, San Fernando Valley, which put many of her friends behind bars yet again; here she speaks openly about her real concerns regarding the regular confiscation of personal property, including the medications she takes for her COPD, and her hopefulness that LA Family Housing might finally rescue her from life on the streets…

This version includes flashback video of Gracie speaking to a Neighborhood Council meeting, and days later being handcuffed and taken to jail for staying in an illegal encampment.

another day, another struggle

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

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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….

Lynda Zazanis shares her frustration at having had her art supplies and finished artworks confiscated several times during homeless encampment cleanups conducted by Los Angeles city and county agencies.