One of Us

This morning I visited the Holy Family Center at St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood, to deliver some items to Dori, one of the homeless women who agreed to participate in the One of Us project. (I wrote an update on her situation in my previous post). She was sitting with a few others around a table eating breakfast, and I broke the news that it looks like the exhibition at city hall is going to be cancelled. When I explained that the main reason was that I refused to allow their portraits to be used as office decorations, and was standing by my promise to them to carefully control the use of their stories and images, to ensure they would not be used in any way that objectified them or did not provide appropriate context, their reaction was to thank me for that. If you look back at the emails I was writing to LAHCID in November, you will find this to be a consistent theme.
When we started One of Us, the driving philosophy was to humanize the homeless by “changing the conversation.” No longer allowing society’s most unfortunate members to be randomly selected and displayed as symbols of a dysfunctional society that doesn’t do nearly enough to help them is part of that change. Unlike the good people at LAHCID, Dori and the others in the group this morning understood that while it is a shame that the stories we recorded will no longer have the high-level audience of influential politicians, and that this would have been a rare opportunity for them to actually have their voices heard by people in power, the more important principle must be given priority, if we are to ever truly change the conversation.
Perhaps this concept is too revolutionary to grasp; it is easier to fall back on tired and ineffective methods, including coveting images for their “value” over what they actually represent. What I was led to believe was a partnership turned out to be little more than just another one-sided power play. If necessary we will find other venues and audiences for these images and stories, with or without the real support of the City of Los Angeles.