Images from the streets: art for social change from the Homelessness Photography Project.

Miller, Cynthia J.

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES THE LANDSCAPE OF HOMELESSNESS, AS IT IS PHOTOGRAPHED by its inhabitants, and the ways in which the act of rendering that landscape visible can foster social change. Images from the Streets" is a photography exhibition, produced through collaboration between Emerson College and Neighborhood Action, Inc., in which all individuals who participate are among the unsheltered homeless--those who spend their nights on heating grates, under highways, and in ATM kiosks. The project and images discussed here will explore the processes and products of the Homeless Photography Project, examining the ways in which the photographers use the images they create as tools for exploring and communicating their experiences and identities, and creating a sense of belonging while living at the margins of the wider community.

At the outset, homeless individuals desiring to participate were supplied with disposable cameras and asked to record images of significant people, places, or occurrences in their worlds. The resulting sets of photographs expressed the shared and yet unique histories, angers, hopes, and visions of the photographers. The resulting images make clear that although individuals on the streets may live without the formal claim to place that inheres in the domiciled population, many use their physical and social environments, no matter how temporary, as tools with which to ground their identities. "Images from the Streets" demonstrates that whether one seeks to understand life histories or map death sites, nearly all knowledge derived from being "place-less" is, in fact, based in place. The act of reconnecting with that knowledge and sense of ownership through photography creates a powerful strategy for grounding individual lives in time and space, weaving threads of interconnectedness through events in the photographers' personal histories, and constructing a sense of belonging and community through the images that are created and shared.

Beyond serving as tools in the construction of a stronger sense of self and the valorization of personal assets so vital to change for the homeless individual, the photographs also served as a means of reconnecting homeless people with the wider community. Homeless individuals are often afforded little consideration in discussions of the life of a community and have even less connection to its sense of history and future, due to popular perceptions of their transience and their lack of status as "stakeholders." Their numbers and the duration of their time on the streets increase dramatically each year, resulting in more and more individuals falling to the margins of the community's policy and planning. As a public exhibition, "Images from the Streets" provided the photographers with an alternative channel of communication with those in the wider community, expressing their persistence within the community and offering a new grammar for understanding their experiences. Photographers selected and titled their own images for exhibition, thus providing a roadmap for viewing and interpreting the photographs. Many were present at a meet-the-photographers reception in their honor, where they could talk about their works with attendees. The subjects of the photographs chosen ranged from bucolic images of parks and urban wildlife, to depictions of personal affiliations and affective ties, to scenes of alienation and despair. Some reflected the unique perspectives of individuals at the margins, and others drew comment as disarmingly similar to photographs that might have been taken by a member of the domiciled community. This recognition of commonality and shared vision was striking to both photographers and viewers, replacing silence, avoidance, and embarrassment with conversations focused on vision, perspective, experience, and possibility.

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In addition to contextualizing these events, the essay also explores the notion of sustainability as it relates to the exhibition, highlighting the ways in which these steps toward social change did not occur in a vacuum or end with the exhibition's closing. The images have traveled together to other venues, their numbers have expanded, and several of the photographers have been asked to speak to community groups and classes about their works and the lives and landscape of the homeless community, adding faces and humanity to the wider community's concept of homelessness. Although still existing very much on the margins of the life of the city, each image and narrative validates experience, reanimates the past, helps to create relationships and communities in the midst of isolation and degradation, and retrieves a bit of a life from the landscape of invisibility.

Homelessness, Identity, and Social Justice

As an embedded community, homeless individuals reside in sites of multiple injustices. They are generally the most disadvantaged of the extremely poor (see Rossi, 1989). Whether living on the streets by choice, or due to soaring housing costs, low wages, inadequate health care, or ever-tightening limits on public assistance programs, homeless people are generally bracketed apart from the wider community's concerns for social justice. In fact, many relate feelings of being an integral part of the general population's perceived injustices. Anthropologist Joanne Passaro (1996) explains that Americans have a cultural tendency to place blame on the homeless (in particular, men), and to see them as shouldering the sole responsibility for their circumstances--as having failed in the performance of their designated social roles. This perception of "unworthiness" eases the complicated feelings and difficult questions that confront the general population about homelessness. It also allows homeless individuals, and the injustices they face, to be dismissed as falling well outside the realm of consideration, or simply added to the bottom of the list of ills plaguing the community. Key elements among the constellation of factors accounting for the rising number of homeless in U.S. cities are poverty and the lack of affordable housing; thus, extreme poverty becomes linked with Passaro's notion of "unworthiness" in the generalized image of homelessness within a community (Shea, 2003; Pitkoff et al., 2003). Commonly reported stereotypes of homelessness are most often of people loitering outside shelters, panhandling on corners and in bus stations, and sleeping on park benches. Since the people who live on the streets--the unsheltered homeless--are the most visible, they tend to be the most closely associated with homelessness. As writer and activist Steve Vanderstaay (1992: 4) explains:

 Homeless people on the street are also the most feared and least
 identified with: people who die ignominious deaths in trash
 compactors, who freeze outside the doors of hospitals, and who
 have been burned alive while sleeping on park benches. They are
 the most hated of homeless people, loathed for their destitution,
 their apparent inability to provide for themselves, and for the
 conflicting array of emotions they evoke in passersby.

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This painful blending of public and private through the status of being homeless brings greater complexity to Wendell Berry's (1990) notion that to know who we are, we must know where we are. Our identity, he writes, is defined to a large degree by our sense of place, our sense of home, and by the traits of our environment. The homeless individuals who contributed to this project often see themselves, and are seen, almost solely through the lens of place--the guy under the bench near the "T," the woman on the heating grate, the old man in the alley. The challenge to enacting social change is to help to draw out and develop individuals' awareness of the significance, value, and validity of their experiences--to illuminate the assets that make each of them a unique member of their community. In the case of the Homeless Photography Project, the participants' photographs serve as tools to affirm and give voice to their knowledge, perspectives, relationships, and stories, to add depth and dimension to those place-based identities through which they are so often limited.

This notion of drawing out assets and highlighting personal capacities is central to the tenets of positive community building (see Kretzmann, 1997; Medoff and Sklar, 1994; Stout, 1996), and is particularly relevant in considerations of homelessness. Building a strong sense of self is key to combating the societal labeling Passaro describes, as well as the hopelessness, depression, and inability to project into the future that afflict the homeless population in far greater proportion than other social groups (National Mental Health Association, 2004). Asset-based community building insists on a "clear commitment to discovering a community's capacities and assets" to generate positive development in all sectors, instead of focusing on needs, deficiencies, and problems (Kretzmann, 1997: 1). Rather than approach homeless individuals as embodiments of a societal problem, or as individuals who have somehow failed at their most basic social role, principles of asset-based community building focus on the unique abilities of all community members, particularly the disenfranchised, to contribute to the community based on their individual traits, abilities, and experiences. These capacities are used to link individuals and groups in ways that emphasize interdependence and creative growth. Creating a space for homeless individuals to explore visual narrative through the Homeless Photography Project is an undertaking in line with those goals--a vehicle with which to explore and highlight personal assets, which might, in turn, be used to nurture a stronger sense of self and foster new connections within the community.

Images and Empowerment

Photography and video projects of this sort have been receiving greater attention over the past several decades, as vehicles for empowerment, media for the expression of identity, and tools in the valorization of experiences. Sometimes framed as "documentary photography," "photoethnography," "participatory video," or as "shooting back," these projects take as their focus the "insider's" perspective, seeking to explore and understand individuals' worlds through their eyes. A significant distinction can be made between still versus moving media, particularly in terms of the processes of representation and interpretation (see Barthes, 1981), yet the common thread among these endeavors is their attempt to find "another way of telling" (Berger, 1982)--to create space for visual narrative among previously silenced, underrepresented, and marginalized groups. Among the earliest and most important of these projects is the film series and volume Through Navajo Eyes (1972) by Sol Worth and John Adair, in which the authors used filmmaking as a medium for attempting to explore how six Navajo men understood and structured their worlds. Using still photography, rather than video, as a medium, Wendy Ewald's (1975) project, Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by the Children of the Appalachians, narrates the everyday lives of Appalachian children in their own words and images, and is frequently cited as one of the foundational efforts in the use of photography with individuals formerly framed as "subjects." Commenting on her later work with Mayan and Ladino children photographing their worlds, Ewald (1993) notes that:

 We now have access to visual images of every corner of the world,
 but we rarely see what those places look and feel like to the
 people who are living there.... My goal is to elicit the images
 inside the children and present them in a context which is
 respectful of the authors and also comprehensible to the rest of us.

In the years since this initial participatory visual work by Worth and Ewald, sociologists, anthropologists, therapists, and others working in visual studies have utilized participatory visual methods with children, the elderly, the terminally ill, and a range of cultural groups (Entine, 1980; White, 2003; Gauntlett, 1997; Hubbard, 1991, 1994). These participatory visual methods, while offering entree to stories and perspectives that are typically unavailable to researchers, also provide opportunities for awareness-raising and social change, as exemplified by the Sundance award-winning documentary, Born into Brothels (ThinkFilm, 2004), and its nonprofit off-shoot, Kids with Cameras. With an eye toward creating more direct social change using participatory visual methods, the recent Photovoice concept (Wang and Burris, 1994) has enabled individuals to chronicle their experiences and enact change within their communities. Photovoice works to generate photographic portrayals of the community at the grass-roots level, while following a problem-based, contextual pedagogy, in which "facilitated group discussions encourage participants to analyze critically and collectively the social conditions that contribute to and detract from their personal and their community's well-being" (Photovoice, 2005).

The power of the photograph lies in its abilities to reveal and reflect, to create dialogue between individuals and social worlds. Paulo Freire (1999: 69) posits: "If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings." Following this logic, dialogue, and at its core, the ability to "speak their word" and "name the world" is a transformative ability that endows significance upon lives and social actors. Images function as a channel for naming the world, and hence, transforming it, through the creation of dialogue and reflection. The act of photographing one's world requires reflection on experiences, values, and identity to determine what one wishes to communicate, and which images will constitute that message. This product, the photograph, then continues the reflective process, through acceptance or rejection as an apt representation, contextual narration, reception by its audience, and the dialogue it encourages. The photograph is a call to look. It captures a glimpse from a unique subjectivity, of a moment that. will never occur again--an occurrence that may never again be observed in the same way. Or as Roland Barthes (1981: 4) suggests, "in the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else...." Through the photographs in "Images from the Streets," the worlds and visions of the project's homeless photographers call out not to be overlooked. The project asks its contributors and audiences to view the experiences and perspectives communicated through the images as inherently valuable--not to be passed over or deemed insignificant in the service of limiting stereotypes.

Origins and Exhibitions

The Homeless Photography Project leading to the "Images from the Streets" exhibition came about in a far less structured fashion than did projects such as Photovoice. The students in my undergraduate "Local Action/Global Change" course were in the midst of a segment on homelessness, and were brainstorming for possible service-learning projects. Several students were avid photographers and suggested the creation of a photography project, wherein they would be the photographers, pairing with homeless individuals and documenting their lives as a community awareness-raising effort. Within this conversation, one student asked: "Why not give the homeless people the cameras, so they can show us what they think matters?" And so, the project emerged.

A group of potential contributors was recommended through my contacts at Neighborhood Action, Inc. This nonprofit organization, in which my students have often volunteered, provides food, clothing, emotional support, and opportunities for the development of assets and abilities through art, writing, and music programs. From those recommendations, six individuals elected to participate and were given disposable cameras. Our broad request, that they take pictures of what was important to them in their daily lives, sought neither to direct nor inhibit. The group of photographers was comprised of five men and one woman--Deb, Tommy, Sly, Billy, George, and Ed--all of whom had been living on the streets for varying lengths of time. All were familiar with the use of a camera. They required no coaching, but were initially concerned about meeting our expectations in terms of the content of the photographs. However, when the project was reframed as "a day in the life"--a story in pictures about what mattered to them most--each seemed to leave with a strong sense of what to include in a series of pictures that would reflect their identities. Deb later described embarking on the experience as being "on a mission. I was going out to take pictures of what I see that you don't.... But I ended up taking pictures of what I see that you don't think I see."

What did the photographers see and record? The images captured on film were highly varied and reflected the perspectives and individualities of the photographers. The subjects, however, may be roughly separated into three broad categories: images of affiliation, images for education, and images of assertion.

Images of affiliation featured relationships and personalities as their focal point. Individuals with whom the photographers held close relationships or shared common space were the central concern of a large number of photographs. In general, these were homeless people. The emphasis of the photographs, however, was not that they were homeless, but that they were people. Solemn faces, laughing faces, thoughtful faces, and angry faces were caught in private moments that would now become public. Billy, whose images were nearly all of this type, described his portfolio as a kind of "family album" and paused at each one to relate stories of first meetings, shared experiences, and separations. Images of outreach workers in unguarded moments--caught unaware and vulnerable, or stepping out of their roles and "mugging" for the camera--also figured significantly in this category. These uncharacteristic displays seemed to deliberately subvert the "typical" relationships that existed between the photographers and volunteers, priests, and activists, and were cited by photographers as illustrations of their belief in a basic, shared humanity and sameness.

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Scenes of individuals and places that typified the homeless condition dominated the category of images for education. Images of overburdened shopping carts, laundry hanging on stairway handrails, human forms barely visible under piles of newspaper and clothing, and heating grates puffing clouds of warm steam all spoke to the day-to-day experiences of homelessness, conveying themes of invisibility, uncertainty, and hopelessness. One particularly notable photograph pictured a long line of legs and feet, awaiting the opening of a soup kitchen for their evening meal. Sly, the author of the image, described it as summing up for him "the endlessness and facelessness of waiting for the basics."

The significance of "place" was communicated most clearly here. Places represented in the photographers' images literally located homelessness--places where those without homes lived, and sometimes died. With these photographs, the contributors mapped out the landscape of homelessness in the downtown area, drawing attention to the underpasses, alleys, and parks where they spent their days and nights, the impoverished tenement houses from which some of them had come, and the "mainstream" spaces, such as the public library or ATM kiosks, that they appropriated for shelter or rest. Each image of place acknowledged the sharp divide between the domiciled population and those on the street, partitioning the downtown area into "our places, where we belong" and "your places, where we squat and trespass and are made unwelcome."

Then there were images of affirmation, which contrasted starkly with these desolate scenes of homelessness. These photographs were not about the alienation or limitations of being homeless, but rather about the strength of vision and potential felt by their authors. Such photographs included scenes of natural beauty, such as a frame full of flowers or swans floating in a pond; dawn just beginning to light the sky, witnessed from the vestibule of a church; self-conscious artistry of perspective, light, and color, intentionally illustrating the creative abilities of the photographer. Their shots affirmed talent and potential. Tommy, who also paints, explained that he had chosen subjects and techniques that would demonstrate his talent and his hope: "Everyone looks at homeless people and thinks we have nothing to offer. They're surprised that I paint, and I think this [photograph] will surprise them too. When I took this, I wanted to show them that I can do something worth looking at."

The commentary and categorizations here actively demonstrate the reflection on experience, relationships, self, and surroundings, prompted by the process of photography. This informal analytical component was the product of several casual meetings, in which the photographers viewed and selected the photographs to be displayed and crafted their titles and narratives. Later, they would do this during the exhibition itself. Although no formal, structured critical analysis of the images was done, these informal categorizations and comments reinforce the value of the photographs as tools for drawing attention to the photographers' worlds and values. They are a call to "look!"--and not simply "look at me," but "look at me see" (Chalfen, 1981). They summon the observer to "look at the meaning in my world."

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The exhibition itself was initially held in the college's main event building, as a kick-off event for "H-Week"--a week of awareness-raising events focused on hunger, homelessness, and housing. The 50 enlarged, matted photographs chosen by the contributors for display were hung gallery-style along the walls and columns of the reception hall-turned-gallery. The event was open to the community at large and featured a reception to honor and meet the photographers. Members of the college community, from the administration, staff, and students, attended the opening, as did the photographers' friends and supporters, staff from Neighborhood Action, Inc., and staff from other homeless outreach programs in the downtown area. Throughout the day, the photographers narrated the stories of their pictures and contextualized them in terms of their lives on the streets.

As an urban college, Emerson lacks the typical physical barriers to the wider community, making the exhibition more generally accessible, but it is important to acknowledge that the standard cultural barriers between college and community--especially the homeless community--still exist. It was essential, therefore, for the exhibition to travel beyond the walls of academia. "Images from the Streets" moved to two area churches. One was in Boston, housing Neighborhood Action's outreach services; the other was in the suburbs, to give wider access and recognition to the photographs. The images were then retired. In a significant demonstration of sustainability, a second, expanded exhibition, conceived and coordinated by the original contributors, was organized on the anniversary of "Images from the Streets" to provide a vehicle for other homeless individuals to tell the stories of their lives in pictures.

Project Outcomes

In assessing the outcomes of the Homeless Photography Project, this display of sustainability was surprising and significant. The project had originally been conceived as one focused on awareness-raising among the college community and the general public, and had been considered successful in terms of visibility, levels of attendance, and degree of positive interaction between those in attendance and the contributors. The project also received recognition and funding from the college's City in Transition (CIT) initiative, and the CIT web site carried many of the exhibited images and contextual narrative. Thus, from an institutional perspective, the project was a success.

More important, what had begun as a spontaneous "in their own voices, from their own visions" initiative grounded in the theories of asset-based development had developed into something much more. The contributors were eager to take an active role and have a defining voice in selecting and contextualizing their photographs. They narrated their images with pride, rather than deflecting the focus away from themselves. In the months that followed, two of the photographers gave talks to classes and community groups about their art and the value of promoting creative expression among the disenfranchised. Tommy explained during one of these talks:

 As long as I paint or take pictures, I know there's more to
 me than just being some guy who lives on a bench in the park.
 I know there's something about me to notice ... something to pull
 me up ... something I know about myself because 1 can look at it
 on the lousy days and remind myself what I've done. Some days, that's
 all I've got. We could all use a little more of that, right? How can
 anybody say that because I'm homeless, I shouldn't have that? That
 if it doesn't get me bus fare or a burger, it's a waste of time?
 That's like saying what's inside me is a waste of time.

That belief led the photo-artists of "Images from the Streets" to take up the project again, on their own, to share with others, with the support of Neighborhood Action. Several new photographers joined the exhibition, mentored by the original contributors. Those of us who had been involved in the original exhibition were invited to the second opening as a surprise. This demonstration of sustainability--initiative, planning, mentoring, and execution--is perhaps the project's most significant contribution toward social change.

Has a similar level of social change been nurtured among students or the wider community due to "Images from the Streets"? In some measurable ways, the answer is "yes." The level of student participation in community service activities linked to homelessness rose significantly after the exhibition. Student activism focused on issues of poverty, affordable housing, and homelessness also increased at the local level, with some students expanding their efforts to national-level events. Anecdotally, many also reported that this was their first direct personal encounter with an individual living on the streets--a small first step in creating dialogue and eroding the barrier between social groups. But does this initial enthusiasm and motivation create lasting change in attitudes and sociopolitical behaviors? Will this lead to greater social justice for those living on the streets? Jim Hubbard (quoted in Cohen, 1993: 438), the creator of "Shooting Back," also searches for answers regarding the outcomes of his photo narrative project, carried out with homeless children:

 If we exhibit children's work at a museum, what does it do to
 people? How does it change anything? The original intent was to
 hold up the images of the dispossessed to the American people as
 often as possible. Does that effect significant change? I don't
 have the foggiest idea.

In this case also, the answer remains to be seen.

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CYNTHIA J. MILLER is scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College (120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 92116; e-mail: cymiller@tiac.net).