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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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