Destitute discourses: the art of orchestrating fear and fantasy in photographs of homeless people.

Crinall, Karen

During the late 1970s the streets of major cities in Western Europe, the United States, Great Britain and Australia swelled with new populations of homeless people. (1) Identified contributing factors included the effects of economic downturn and subsequent adjustments to fiscal policy in order to address balance-of-payment deficits, gentrification of low-cost housing, the withdrawal of funding from public housing and welfare programs, and increasing poverty due to rising unemployment. (2) The eruption of managerialism, neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the consequent further polarization between the poor and the wealthy, shifted the profile of the homeless subject. Youth and women with children were identified as the largest growing subsets amongst the new homeless. (3) In this climate of increasing social problems, retreating government responsibility for social welfare, and a return to 19th-century attitudes about poverty and its causes, there was a revival of the documentary zeal of the 1930s and 1940s. The emergent homeless population composed of sole mothers and 'street-kids', accommodated in squats and the cast-off cardboard containers of consumer goods, constituted inspiring subject matter for photographers, journalists, film-makers and artists.

The resultant photographic images displayed variously in advertising, news media, welfare publicity, social documentary and the visual arts portray damaged, disaffected individuals. They are almost always presented as simultaneously victims and victimizers, dangerous to themselves and others, visibly scarred by the inability to succeed as productive citizens. Homeless youth, although often presented as threatening, are also composed as 'pathetic' creatures. This is not a new visual device: social activists have circulated representations of homeless women and children since the mid-1800s. As emotive images grounded in discourses which assert particular forms of desirable femininity and ideal childhood, they mobilize a range of moral and social responses and exercise persuasive power by inciting guilt and indignation.

This emergent post-1970s homelessness is construed as a complex threat operating in diverse ways. Firstly, in the news media, homelessness is represented in terms of a bifurcated 'subject': on the one hand a dangerous other, whose existence is external to the social body; on the other, a damaged, individualized self whose pathetic identity has been shaped by life on the streets. Secondly, the art and fashion industries tap into middle-class desires to be 'other' by aestheticizing the bodily evidence of destitution and addiction: emaciation, bruising, needle-marks, nakedness, sexual vulnerability. Once the antithesis of consumerism, homelessness has become its commodity through a conjuncture of art and social activism. The contemporary /postmodern portrait of the homeless person, always the signifier of compounded lack--of access to material resources, skills, health, education, employment, beauty, dignity--does not represent a deserving or undeserving subject, or even, as has also been argued, a competent or incompetent individual. (4) Instead we are presented with a product, a curdled amalgam of individual and collective desire. In this article I explore some of the moral and aesthetic devices that have contributed to this visual discourse in which the adolescent and female homeless are simultaneously positioned as objects of fear, fantasy and hope. In doing so I draw on two distinct photographic genres--social documentary and newspaper images--which make use of similar discursive devices.

Over the past three decades, socially concerned documentary makers, photographers, welfare and community workers, human service organizations, and homeless people themselves have attempted to redress the stereotyping of homeless people as not only male and alcoholic, but also as oppressed and powerless victims. (5) Among these efforts are numerous examples of socially concerned photo-documentary texts produced since the 1980s. (6) These glossy, black and white, large-format volumes are aesthetic compilations of confrontational imagery and vernacular text. The unretouched, unadorned portraiture style deliberately illuminates the subjects' imperfections. Blemishes, wounds, piercings and tattoos signify bodies scarred by life on the streets. Details of how and why the author/photographer decided to embark on a project of documenting homeless people's lives, the circumstances in which the photographs were taken, and the subjects' personal stories offer the reader an insider view of 'life on the outside'. These confessional-style accounts weave misfortune, abuse, violence, illness, addiction, loss, strength, hope, resilience and courage into a simultaneously horrifying and inspiring spectacle of otherness. In many of these examples the activities required of the reader/viewer are to observe, acknowledge and emotionally respond to the human vulnerability and victimization of those depicted. In others there is an appeal to enter the discourse and become part of the intimate exchange that took place as the camera shutter clicked.

Julia Ballerini argues that such projects--despite the photographer's genuine concern for their subjects' circumstances--depoliticize social issues through an emphasis on family values and the 'promotion of individual moral transformation'. (7) Further, she suggests that this sort of documentary project provides new opportunities to play out the 'ambivalent desires and fears' about 'untamed and uncivilized' people and places that were previously explored and enacted through colonization. Regardless of the concerted efforts by social welfare organizations and the media, it has proven extremely difficult to represent homeless people as anything other than 'deserving' victims or 'undeserving' villains. (8)

Attempts to overturn this pathologization of the individual have frequently resulted in a discomforting inversion, with homeless children appearing animalized, the hunted and predatory inhabitants of alleyways and deserted dwellings. (9) The children in Mark and Bell's Streetwise, for instance, portrayed as scavenging to survive in an inhospitable and mortally dangerous world, are caught within this representational trap. The 'real' characters--those who dwell in Pike Street, Seattle--provide a ready-made cast and the necessary elements of oppression, victimization and dehumanization required for a successful script. (10) In the introduction to Streetwise John Irving comments:

 The children of Pike Street are runaways; when I first saw
 Mary Ellen Mark's photographs of them--in the spring of
 1983--I knew they were perfect characters for an important
 story, because they were both perfect and important victims.
 The characters in any important story are always victims;
 even the survivors of an important story are victims. At the
 time, Seattle's Green River Killer had already murdered 28
 young girls, yet the teenagers of Pike Street were holding
 their own--pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were
 eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed,
 being treated for venereal diseases passed on to them by
 their customers. (11)

In short, the inhabitants of Pike Street survive against all odds. The central protagonist in Streetwise is Tiny, 'a fourteen-year-old girl, malnourished, an accomplished prostitute with a lengthy record of occupational diseases'. (12) From front to back cover Tiny is a tragic, vulnerable figure (ill. 1) In a Lolita-esque performance she oscillates from soliciting on the streets to blowing bubble-gum, dressing-up like a model and resting her head on her mother's shoulder. As Tiny performs the abused, neglected, but provocative and resilient child/adult, her (alcoholic) mother, Pat, is similarly cast as a conflicted survivor, simultaneously an abusive, neglectful, loving and caring parent, the product of her own history of victimization. The narrative of unchecked deviancy contained within the covers of Streetwise perpetuates the belief that the behaviours of the 'lower, criminal and dangerous' classes must be kept under control for the safety of middle-class society. At the same time, the capacity of 'these types of people' to endure and survive their toxic lives is represented as an astounding feat of human survival. It is the stuff of blockbuster movies.

The character of Pat, the dangerous mother, provides a locus through which the audience can play out and appease its own uncertain morality, and within which it (we) can locate responsibility for the cause and solution to Tiny's circumstances. The viewer's own role in oppression is obscured by the simultaneous activity and passivity of looking. As Stott and Berger observe, photographs that use human agony to confront the remote viewer present discontinuous moments, events and scenes that exist outside the viewer's life-world, experience and, often, comprehension. (13) This can result in the viewer interpreting this disjuncture as 'their own personal moral inadequacy'. (14) The resultant shock response depoliticizes the moment portrayed, and the image 'becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody'. (15)

In another of these photo-documentary projects, the photographer Howard Schatz describes his shock at the sight of a homeless woman that led to his project documenting and portraying the homeless of San Francisco. Schatz believed that the only way to come to terms with what he saw was to turn the scene into a photograph so that he could look more closely and also share the image with others. Schatz explains:

 She gazed straight ahead, not looking anyone in the eye, as
 if not to be seen. Business people and shoppers walked by.
 At the time, begging on city streets in the United States was
 rare and the sight of this woman shocked and moved me. In
 order to know who she was, I needed to see her and to make
 a photograph; and I wanted others to see it. (16)

Schatz discloses his desire to see and to gaze upon not only a destitute woman but also one who is unable, through physical disability, or perhaps unwillingness due to shame, to meet the gaze of those who read her sign. Readers of Schatz's account are left uncertain as to whether the woman is visually impaired while at the same time he relates how his own ability to see, and thus to know, is enabled and mediated through the camera lens. Schatz's account (which is not accompanied by a photograph) states that only by taking a photograph could he know the real woman. The description evokes Paul Strand's well-known image Blind Woman in New York, 1916 (ill. 2). (17)

An initial reading of Strand's reflections on his portraits of 1915-1916 suggests that Schatz and Strand, working seventy-five years apart in contexts with very different moral codes, did not use their cameras for the same purposes. (18) Strand, accountable to the art of photography, seems to have been driven by an aesthetic conviction to produce 'straight' photographs uncontaminated by 'other people's vision'. (19) To this end he used a concealed camera. Although his words reveal how he objectified people in the process of creating photographic subjects, Strand states:

 I always felt that my relationship to photography and to
 people was serious, and that I was attempting to give
 something to the world and not exploit people. I wasn't
 making picture postcards to sell ... I never questioned the
 morality of it. (20)

This attitude is more revealing of the moral regime of the time than of deficiencies in Strand's personal ethics. Strand believed images produced by concealing his camera, thus denying subjects an awareness of the process, would reveal the 'essence' of the captured moment. Consistent with the philosophies of the photo-secessionists, Strand held that the truth (the ultimate form of beauty) would be revealed through the encapsulated photographic moment.

Despite Strand's apparent naivety and humility, it is difficult today to interpret the image Blind Woman in New York, 1916, as anything other than a composite of betrayals. In stealing the shot, and also by permitting the circulation of her likeness for public consumption, Strand exploited the woman's clearly advertised inability to see. He presented her image as a form of art in which the absence of classical beauty signified truth. According to the logic in this self-enclosing chain of inversions, the truth subsequently represents the ultimate form of beauty. Thus it is the image as object that is beautiful, not the 'real' woman; her actual embodiment represents the ugliness of life and humanity. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that Strand had any intention of assisting this woman or of raising awareness about her circumstances as a social issue. Although the image may be described as a social document, it is not about changing this woman's life, but about the voyeurism of art: watching a woman who cannot look back, at the same time raising doubts about her honesty--perhaps she can see through her (almost squinting) left eye? Westerbeck and Meyerowitz ungenerously reflect that '[h]er dead eye draws our compassion at the same time that the acquisitive gleam in her other eye, as it scans the street, makes us suspicious'. (21)

It is possible that Strand's representation is a projection of his own guilt for acquiring the woman's image dishonestly. On the other hand, perhaps Strand's 'objective' approach exposes his primary loyalty to the aesthetic of modernism, in which all people and objects are reduced to disengaged shape and form. Reflecting on why he took photographs of street people, Strand claims: 'I photographed these people because I felt that they were all people whom life had battered into some sort of extraordinary interest and, in a way, nobility'. (22)

Naomi Rosenblum suggests that Strand used the camera's concealment to overcome 'the forced relationship that frequently develops when photographer and subject are of different social classes'. She goes on to say that Strand achieved this 'unqualified--almost embarrassing--directness of expression [by avoiding] interpersonal tensions'. (23) Strand's concealed camera provided him with 'a mantle of invisibility'. (24) And yet, Strand's photography, according to Trachtenberg, was about social change. Trachtenberg suggests that Strand sought to 'engage photography in the process of social change by depicting the unchanging, the timeless, the universal'. (25) Although modernist and progressive, it would seem that Strand, somewhat enigmatically, sought to achieve change by confronting the optimism of the new with the unyielding and unchanging old, which capitalist 'progressiveness' could not undo. In this contradictory vein the subject of Blind Woman in New York, 1916 is both victim and survivor. Her portrayal suggests a form of resistance that unavoidably becomes a further act of victimization. She cannot overcome her otherness and is thus robbed of hope as she is inscribed in an abstract fantasy about the relationship between beauty and truth.

Schatz, on the other hand, in describing a photographic moment some seventy-five years later, could not avoid describing how he engaged with homeless people in order to take their photographs, nor entertain the belief that objective distance is moral practice: Schatz was not permitted the personal comfort of concealing his camera from the people he wished to portray. This might be because social documentary photography in the late 20th century was less tolerant of impressions about people, placing the emphasis instead upon impressions of people. Although some beliefs about poverty have endured since 1916, there have also been significant changes in attitude about people marginalized by disability. It is doubtful that Howard Schatz would have achieved a sense of authenticity in, or attracted the support of a 1990s audience for, a publication that portrayed unwilling subjects or even covertly suggested that disadvantaged people were dishonest or undeserving. Consent has become a moral issue and a legal obligation in many contexts where photographs are now taken.

Setting up a makeshift studio in the streets, Schatz established relationships with his subjects, asking various questions about their well-being, such as where they ate and slept and the source and level of their income. He is emphatic about his desire to see the faces of the people he met:

 I wanted to see--to look directly at each face. I used a dark
 cloth as a backdrop, so that no other information (locale,
 street signs, other people) would distract from the eye-to-eye,
 face-to-face experience ... always attempting to be
 respectful and warm. (26)

Schatz does not want merely to see his subjects or look upon their images; he wants the experience of connecting with the homeless away from the chaos of their transient environments, as if the illusional eye-to-eye contact, facilitated by the fall of a shutter, is akin to a form of communion.

There are traces in Schatz's work of Thompson and Smith's Street Life in London, first published in 1877. (27) These photographers set up street studios too, and as in Thompson's early social documentary text, engaged the homeless subject in conversation, encouraging them to tell their story. Rather than offering food and money as Thompson and Smith did, Schatz offered his subjects their portraits. However, it is in providing explanations for homelessness that the similarities are most revealing. Schatz identifies individual misfortune as the reason for destitution, thus revealing his primary occupation as an image-maker rather than informed social reformer. His words are underwritten by a sense of fatalism:

 For many, homelessness in a large part results from
 misfortune or accident: familial, emotional, social, and
 economic. An individual cannot choose his or her genetic
 make-up or skin color. One's social and emotional
 development, degree of parental care and guidance, family
 structure, and early education are not matters of choice ...
 The vast majority of homeless people are poor and
 vulnerable, struggling desperately and suffering helplessly
 and hopelessly. They don't know how to or just can't get out from
 under. (28)

Like Strand, Schatz uses the camera to look more closely at the other. In the examples described here, the other is a destitute woman. The difference between Strand's approach and Schatz's is not who does the looking or who is looked at, but how the looking is done. Schatz does not even need to show us the image on which his confessional introductory rationale is based. For anyone familiar with North American photography, his description immediately evokes the image of Strand's Blind Woman in New York, 1916. (29) For readers unfamiliar with that particular photograph, there is little doubt that they will be able to draw on their own store of images of urban destitution. The iconography of the homeless woman is now so solidly implanted in the social psyche of the developed world that we do not have to look at an actual image; we carry it with us. The bag lady appears as an enigmatic, pitiable, yet powerful figure in novels, newspapers, movies and television programs.

It is worth noting that since the mid 20th-century it has become far more likely that people will have seen a photographic (or digital) representation of something than to have ever seen the thing itself. (30) As Jean Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum holds, this incessant, insatiable visual fodder produces, perpetuates and responds to an almost addictive fascination. (31) Fed by countless daily representations in newspapers and on television and computer screens, in advertising, movies, and publicity campaigns, we not only gaze upon, but like Schatz and Strand, attempt to consume the other through their representation and constant re-representation as simulacra.

In the closing statement of the introduction to his book, Schatz describes his moral imperative to keep the homeless visible:

 Since the sight of homeless people in the streets has become
 so common, we have stopped noticing. We don't want to be
 caught looking. It is easier to keep on walking, to ignore
 them, and to imagine that they are not there. I made these
 photographs because I had to look. (32)

Schatz's approach, like that of many social documentary photographers, assumes that awareness is an active and productive behaviour, that photographs of real people 'awaken the viewer's conscience and incite action'. (33) Although many documentary images elicit emotional responses from privileged viewers, the visibility of homeless people as aestheticized objects does not necessarily translate into action to their advantage. Authorities in urban centres more frequently seek to have the homeless removed from public sight than address their circumstances in any substantial way.

During the 1970s the genre of social documentary photography was challenged by writers such as Susan Sontag and John Berger. Sontag, echoing Berger's sentiments, stated that 'concerned' photography 'has done as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it'. (34) Informed by the idea that ultimately all photographs aestheticize their subjects for a consumer market, (35) some photographers took the position that publicly portraying realistic, documentary-style images of socially disadvantaged and marginalized people was a further exploitation. More recently, this opinion has been heatedly expressed in criticisms of Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother, which claim that the photograph's subject, Florence Neil, never benefited personally from the image's proliferation. Florence Neil's daughter, Katherine McIntosh, five years old when the picture was taken, laments that 'Lange had told mother it would never be published and that it was to help people in the Depression. Now I think it has gone far enough ... what upsets us is that people are making money out of our mother's pain'. (36)

In a later wave of criticism, Martha Rosler, Paula Rabinowitz and Sally Stein also take issue with the effectiveness of documentary photography in bringing about social change, claiming that in most cases the photographer's personal and professional benefit far exceeds any advantages achieved for their subjects. (37) On the other hand, Vicki Goldberg asserts that documentary imagery has played a significant role in influencing social reform. (38) Offering a less polarizing perspective, Naomi Rosenblum suggests that for some the issue is less about the ethics of taking the photograph than the problem of saturation, and thus overkill with respect to the issue at hand. (39) Like Berger and Sontag, Rosenblum observes that the sheer volume of images intended to disturb the viewer has resulted in a diminished ability to respond effectively.

Some photographers have also become concerned about the impact public representation as a disadvantaged person or group has on the portrayed individuals, their families and communities. In 1988 Kristine Larsen produced a series of photographs of homeless women in New York in which the faces of the women were scratched out. (40) It is unclear whether her intention was to protect the identity of the women or to make a political statement about their status as 'non-persons'. Scratch marks across the surface of the photograph give the impression that the subject has been attacked. The viewer is confronted with violence without witnessing an actual assault. The embellished and disturbed reality/truth of the images leaves intention and meaning open. In desecrating a representation of 'the homeless woman', Larsen produces an image that positions homeless women as victims. She also undermines her own position (and thus ours) as the privileged observer. What the viewer might have seen is already destroyed, and thus we are also denied access to the experience of the subject. Presented in this way, the photographic image/object is a corruption. The sign 'homeless woman' is at once constructed and destroyed.

During the 1980s the distinctions between art and documentary in photographic practice were not only seen to be arbitrary by many photographers, but were also deliberately collapsed. This was partly driven by efforts to politicize the social injustices caused by governments retreating from social welfare obligations. This also appealed to the more traditional art market, where individual identity is obscured in all but the portraiture of the famous and notorious. Perhaps there are shades here too of the Victorian middle- and upper-class preference for artistic images of the poor. Although an entirely different genre of image-making, and without the artistic flair and social conscience of documentary photography, photographs in the news media have deployed an array of similarly theatrical and contradictory messages about homeless people. In November 2000, the Melbourne-based tabloid, the Herald Sun, ran a series of articles titled 'Clean Up Our Streets'. (41) These articles were illustrated with depictions of beggars, addicts, squatters, graffiti and police. A colour front-page spread shows two young people climbing out of what appears to be an underground tunnel or drain. The caption reads: 'Holed up: two squatters emerge from their city home'. We can clearly see the face of one bare-shouldered youth whose head is haloed by bright sunlight. He looks up directly into the camera and thus at the viewer. The eyes of the other 'squatter', who would also have been looking straight out at the viewer, are obscured by a black rectangle. There is no obvious explanation as to why the face of one and not the other is disguised. The picture sits directly below the headline 'Shame of Our City'.

Occasional masking of the subject's face is an established practice in photojournalism and news reportage. This usually takes the form of blacking out the eyes or, more recently, digitally scrambling the entire face. This has the dual function of safeguarding the subject's identity and protecting the media corporation against litigation. The black rectangle commonly signifies proximity to the law--criminality, the involvement of the individual with the legal system or their status as a statutory client, such as a ward of the state. As with the more artistic and politically sophisticated representations discussed earlier, rather than being obliterated, the subject is simultaneously displayed, exposed, obfuscated and redefined, rendered at once invisible and visible through the photographic discourse.

In another set of images in the Herald Sun a bare-footed young person is crouched on stone steps that lead to large graffiti-covered metal doors. (42) Paper, plastic bags and other debris are scattered around the figure. The person's gender is not clear, although hairstyle and posture create the impression of a young woman. Despite the subject looking down, what might have been the visible portion of the face is digitally scrambled. (43) Together with the hastily removed sports shoes and the clumsy enactment of shooting up, the overall effect is to throw the realism of the image into question rather than to enhance its authenticity. (44)

The selection of the location for the activity is also somewhat unusual--in full public view, seated mid-way on a set of stone steps. It is apparent the author wants the reader to believe this is an everyday occurrence. The caption reads 'Nothing's hidden: amid the litter and graffiti a young addict shoots up'. (45) The reporter, Rachel Hodder, describes her incognito entry into the 'depressing, intimidating and at times dangerous stretch', which is Melbourne's Swanston Street, once the city's 'Golden Mile'. The squat (depicted on the front page by its entrance hole) is described as 'something out of a Hollywood movie'. Thus destitution in Melbourne is portrayed as the kind of fiction produced by the mass entertainment industry. The homeless of Melbourne and their environs are simulacra, representations of a representation. Amid the popularized faces of this 'new' homelessness are teenagers injecting drugs in full public view and living in underground squats that reek of urine. Their faces obscured like monstrous phantoms, homeless youth dare to come out during the day, lurking amid the other detritus caused by the fast food chains and discount stores that also sit beside 'some of Melbourne's most lavish and expensive buildings'. (46)

The irony is not so much, as Hodder suggests, that immoral behaviour occurs among cheap and shoddy businesses on the doorsteps of some of Melbourne's most noble architecture. Rather, it is in the tabloid's sustained emphasis on the criminality and immorality of impoverished and marginalized people going about their daily life in an environment demarcated for retail and commercial business. There is no evidence of concern about the gross injustices these young people have experienced at the hands of free-market capitalism and the unravelling of government responsibility for the marginalized. Still the news media demonize the poor, construing them as uncivilized and uncivilizing, so abhorrent that they can only be compared with the fantasy horror of Hollywood. They are not permitted a place in the real world. Their manufactured visibility is cause for their further exclusion. As Pat Carlen writes:

 While homelessness in itself has been a site of struggle over
 social change since the sixteenth century, in western
 democracies visible homelessness has also perennially
 activated anxieties and ambivalences about the moral
 foundations of both citizen security (of person and property)
 and state legitimacy ... at the end of the twentieth century,
 the conditions of misery, poverty and exploitation which the
 welfare state was supposed to abolish still flourish. (47)

This series attracted considerable criticism from homelessness activists. (48) Mark Furlong commented that '[t]his [kind of] denigrating and scare-mongering image[ry] converges the mentally ill with the drug addicted thus constructing new, and doubly disturbing phenomena. This troubling figure is dangerously 'masculine'". (49) According to Ben Rossiter:

 [t]he nebulous notion of the 'undesirable' has shifted into
 an open hostility and contempt for homeless people. The
 homeless are now scum that must be 'cleaned' from the
 'dirty old town', the once proud and gracious city now
 crumbling into urban decay. (50)

Such representations of the homeless elicit images of dark and dangerous 19th-century London gripped in a state of terror by such threatening characters as Jack the Ripper. However, as street-working prostitutes were the target of the Ripper's sadistic attacks, and he is commonly thought to have been a middle-class 'gentleman', one has to wonder who is most at risk in the retrograde Melbourne of these Victorian fantasies.

While vilifying homeless people as 'obscene parasites' (51) and 'feral runaways' (52) continues to be popular with the media, these are masculinized representations. (53) Women are often portrayed in terms of features associated with the stereotypical homeless male, such as personal neglect, substance addiction, mental illness, anti-sociality, hostility, violence and aggression. They are presented as isolated, non-productive individuals unable to care for or nurture others, and thus as incompetent, if not undeserving. There are less demeaning representations of homeless women that challenge these damning portraits, but these are frequently tainted with masculine fantasies of vulnerable, compliant femininity in which the cultural signifiers of 'homelessness' and 'woman' converge to produce a redeemable subject.

In 1999 the Melbourne Age ran a cover story titled 'Soaring From the Streets to the Heavens'. The introduction reads: 'it is when she sets her face to sing that the fight falls from her eyes, squeezed out by the surrender to bliss'. (54) The colour portrait is of an angelic young woman called Isabel. Her face is sun-lit, a forest or garden constitutes half the picture frame and forms the backdrop. Isabel is wearing a school blazer and looks serenely over her left shoulder at the viewer. With doe-like eyes and a satisfied half-smile, she leans her back against a broken brick wall. Her face is almost saintly. Indeed, the opening paragraph recalls descriptions of the ecstasies of mediaeval female saints. Isabel is seventeen years old and homeless. She is also about to fly (soar) to England to sing at St Paul's (heavenly) cathedral. After a childhood of (seemingly self-inflicted) anguish, placements in care, suicide attempts, psychiatric interventions and stealing to survive, Isabel is on the path to redemption.

Her determination to be educated, her angelic voice, the assistance of St Vincent de Paul's Access Youth Support program, and 'caring, worried' parents, have helped rescue Isabel from homelessness. She is described as having 'kicked with all her might against the worthy expectations of the people who had called her to life. It was hell for everyone'. (55) Now, with clear skin, bright eyes, tidy hair and the voice of an angel, Isabel is heaven bound, deftly redirected from the downward spiral that leads to the hell of destitution.

In this representation, homelessness becomes the signifier for having surmounted the impossible. The qualities of traditional femininity--a voice that 'catches in your chest like the soft call of a glass bell', the ability to manage and survive on a starvation budget (the article claims Isabel saved $1,000 while on Austudy allowance), and the discipline to maintain her education while transient--represent the means of achievement. (56) Isabel's image draws links with religious joy and ethereality as her accomplishments and self-discipline signify hope for other homeless young people. At the same time a more discomforting message is conveyed--the homelessness of children can result from their own unmanageability (that is, it is their fault). What is more, overcoming family disconnection and state care requires the heroic conviction of the child. Only when this is proven, as in Isabel's case, do big rewards follow. While for the Saturday morning reader this fable might be reassuring, for homeless young people it is likely to remain a fairy tale.

The photographic portrayal of the destitute woman is framed by assumptions about who homeless women are and thus how they might be represented. (57) Despite claims to truth, the photographed woman has no origin. She derives from a complex discursive field of homeless representations that determine who, what and how the subject (or in government department jargon, 'target' or 'client' group) is to be deemed visible. (58) The challenge then becomes how to produce a representation that is not dependent on traditional frameworks for defining the subject 'homeless woman'. I would argue that this necessarily requires that she be represented in an infinity of forms and as many locations. Certainly, whether sympathetic or damning, portrayals that exploit artistic and sensationalizing devices while drawing on masculine fantasies of ideal femininity do little to convey actual experience. These act instead to feed the desire of the privileged to access vicariously their own liberation through the imagined freedoms of the other.

Of course the representational space of photography always exists in a relation to the world that is at once both more than, and less than, real. In its para-realism the photograph offers a fractured simulacrum. As much as it is impossible for the photographic image to offer the actual in any complete form, it manages to balance the deception of realism with the realism of deception. If these images were completely false, the power of the photograph to be so convincing a rendition of the real would be undone. All fiction must tell some truths. John Tagg refers to this as 'the metaphoric tendency of Realism, in which a part can stand for the whole, and easily identified similarities substituted for one another'. (59) The strength of photographs that depict social issues lies in their ability to sustain the interplay between truth and fiction, science and art, because as cultural and political objects they are always simultaneously both. The images must contain enough authenticity to convince us that what we see is a reality, and sufficient visual appeal to capture and hold our gaze. This is rarely achieved without accompanying text. As I hope the above discussion demonstrates, there is little difference between the discourses of documentary and the news media in this regard.

The destitute woman and the homeless child have operated iconically and metaphorically over centuries to signify a liminal zone of near, but not quite, hopelessness, a condition and a place where some shadow of hope might still be found through individual and collective, and real and imaginary acts of redemption. In this sense, the idea of 'homelessness' provides a measure for human will and desire, an indicator of the possibility for the isolated to overcome the obstacles of marginalization in order to re/gain social belonging and material comfort. In this way, the problem of homelessness is able to represent unrealized individual potential.

Social documentary and news media photographs may seek to alter viewers' attitudes and beliefs--though regrettably not always--with the purpose of transforming for the better the lives of those represented. Whether well- or ill-intentioned, they constitute an intervention, an interruption in everyday life. (60) Founded on the belief that to see is to know, photographs are able to exercise these effects through their currency as truth objects. However, as sight--the visible--is a way of knowing, it is always at the same time a means of deception. Even though photographic images derive meaning from, and perpetuate meaning within their discursive contexts, their realism can also enable subversion of the discourses that contain them. Thus the challenge continues to be how to represent homelessness in ways that undo the discourses of fear and fantasy and give it social appeal and political meaning. Perhaps the camera lens should focus more frequently on the political, economic, cultural and moral regimes that orchestrate homelessness rather than the homeless themselves.

(1.) See D. Wagner, 'Reinterpreting the "Undeserving Poor": From Pathology to Resistance', in M. J. Huth and T. Wright (eds), International Critical Perspectives on Homelessness, Westport, Praeger, 1997, pp. 55-68; P. Carlen, Jigsaw: A Political Criminology of Youth Homelessness, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1996; and E. Hallebone, 'Homelessness and Marginality in Australia: Young and Old People Excluded from Independence', in Huth and Wright, 'Reinterpreting the "Undeserving Poor"', pp. 69-106.

(2.) G. Daly, 'Charity Begins at Home: A Cross-national View of the Voluntary Sector in Britain, Canada and the United States' in Huth and Wright, 'Reinterpreting the "Undeserving Poor"', pp. 167-84. See also Hallebone.

(3.) Carlen, Women, Crime and Poverty, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1988; Huth, 'America's New Homeless: Single Parent Families', in Huth and Wright, 'Reinterpreting the "Undeserving Poor"', pp. 41-54, 1997; P. H. Rossi, 'The Old Homeless and the New Homelessness in Historical Perspective', American Psychologist, vol. 45, no. 8, 1990, pp. 954-59; H. Tierney (ed.), Women's Studies Encyclopedia: Views from the Sciences, New York, Greenwood Press, 1989; S. Watson and H. Austerberry, Housing and Homelessness: A Feminist Perspective, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.

(4.) R. Rosenthal, 'Visions Within the Movement(s): Imaging Homelessness and Homeless People', Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, vol. 9, no. 2, 2000, pp. 111-26.

(5.) I have discussed elsewhere how, despite a photo-documentary renaissance infused with feminist awareness, the representation of homeless women has continued to reproduce stigmatizing stereotypes. The discursive favouring of oppositional dualisms, such as men/women, visible/invisible, old/new, to illustrate differences between the homeless populations of the late-20th century and those of earlier decades has perpetuated gender inequity. In this article I revisit some of the photographic projects and images discussed in: K. Crinall, 'Representing the Invisible: Images of Women Among the "New" Faces of Homelessness', Parity, vol. 14, no. 1, 2001, pp. 7-9. Parity is published by the Melbourne-based peak body, The Council To Homeless Persons.

(6.) See, for example, M. E. Mark, Streetwise, New York, Aperture, 1988; J. Goldberg in collaboration with P. Brookman, Raised by Wolves, New York, Scalo, 1995; and H. Schatz, Homeless: Portraits of Americans in Hard Times, 1993, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1993.

(7.) J. Ballerini, 'Photography as a Charitable Weapon: Poor Kids and Self-representation', Radical History Review, vol. 69, 1997, p. 162.

(8.) For more about 'deserving' victims see S. Platt, 'Home Truths: Media Representations of Homelessness', in B. Franklin (ed.), Social Policy, the Media and Misrepresentation, London, Routledge, pp. 104-17, 1999.

(9.) B. Rossiter, 'Experts and Animals', Arena Magazine, October-November 1993, pp. 30-2; Rossiter, '"Experts and Animals" revisited', Parity, vol. 14, no. 1, 2001, pp. 12-14.

(10.) The photographs and text in Streetwise were produced as part of a collaborative project out of which the documentary film of the same name by Martin Bell (Mark's partner) was produced. An edited version of the film's soundtrack appears at the back of the text.

(11.) J. Irving, 'Introduction' in Mark, Streetwise.

(12.) Irving, in Streetwise, p. xiii.

(13.) W. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973; and J. Berger, About Looking, New York, Pantheon Books, 1980.

(14.) Berger, About Looking, pp. 39-40.

(15.) Berger, About Looking, p. 40.

(16.) H. Schatz, Homeless, p.vii.

(17.) Paul Strand was a 'straight' photographer of the American photo-secessionist movement led by Alfred Steiglitz (1864-1946).

(18.) See letter written to Helmut Gernsheim in 1960, in Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends 1839-1960, New York, Dover, 1991, p. 152.

(19.) Strand, cited in Gernsheim, Creative Photography, p. 154.

(20.) Strand, cited in C. Tomkins, 'Paul Strand: Look to the Things Around You', in P. R. Petruck (ed.), The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-century Photography, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1979, pp. 71-2.

(21.) C. Westerbeck and J. Meyerowitz, Bystander, a History of Street Photography, London, Thames and Hudson, 1994, p. 95.

(22.) Cited in A. Trachtenburg, 'Introduction', in M. Stange (ed.), Paul Strand, Essays on His Life and Work, New York, Aperture, 1990, p. 16.

(23.) N. Rosenblum, 'The Early Years', in Stange, Paul Strand, Essays, pp. 31-52.

(24.) Trachtenburg, in Stange, Paul Strand, Essays, p. 16.

(25.) Trachtenburg, in Stange, Paul Strand, Essays, p. 16.

(26.) Schatz, Homeless, p. viii.

(27.) J. Thompson and A. Smith, Street Life in London, London, Benjamin Bloom, 1969.

(28.) Schatz, Homeless, pp. x-xii (my emphasis).

(29.) Walker Evans described this photograph as 'charging him up' and teaching him what to do in photography. See Trachtenburg, in Stange, Paul Strand, Essays, p. 16.

(30.) M. Longford, Story of Photography, Oxford, Focal Press, 1990.

(31.) J. Baudrillard, 'Simulacra and Simulations', in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. M. Poster, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1988, pp. 166-84.

(32.) Schatz, Homeless, p.xi.

(33.) N. Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, New York, Abbeville Press, 1994.

(34.) S. Sontag, On Photography, London, Penguin, 1977, p. 21.

(35.) Sontag, On Photography, p. 110.

(36.) McIntosh, cited in P. Lennon, 'Used by the News', the Age, Melbourne, 1999, p. 1.

(37.) M. Rosler, 'In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on documentary photography)', in R. Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, Mass., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989, pp. 303-42; P. Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented: the Politics of Documentary, London, Verso, 1994; and S. Stein, 'Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis', Afterimage, no. 10, May 1983, pp. 9-16.

(38.) V. Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives, New York, Abbeville Press, 1993.

(39.) Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, p. 204.

(40.) See Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, p. 204.

(41.) R. Hodder, 'Shame of Our City', Herald Sun, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 1, 5.

(42.) The subject's shoes can be seen in the foreground, suggesting they were removed for the photograph.

(43.) I also discuss this image in Parity, v. 14, no. 1, 2001.

(44.) The subject holds a syringe, implying that the young person is injecting drugs. The angle of the needle, however, suggests the drug would be injected into the veins of the wrist, not a common choice for regular users.

(45.) Hodder, 'Shame of Our City', p. 5.

(46.) Hodder, 'Shame of Our City', p. 5.

(47.) P. Carlen, Jigsaw: a Political Criminology of Youth Homelessness, p. 81 (my emphasis).

(48.) See Parity, v. 14, no. 1, 2001. The editorial and four out of nine articles addressed the issue.

(49.) M. Furlong, 'Obscene Parasites and Dangerous Losers: How the homeless are Represented and Might be Case Managed', Parity, vol. 14, no. 1, p. 10.

(50.) Rossiter, '"Experts and Animals" revisited', p. 13.

(51.) Furlong, 'Obscene Parasites and Dangerous Losers', p. 9.

(52.) Rossiter, '"Experts and Animals" revisited', p. 12.

(53.) See both Crinall and Furlong in Parity, vol. 14, no. 1.

(54.) J. Elder, 'Soaring from the Streets to the Heavens', The Age, Melbourne, 1999, p. 1.

(55.) See Elder, 'Soaring from the Streets' (my emphasis).

(56.) See Elder, 'Soaring from the Streets'.

(57.) S. Watson, 'Homelessness Revisited: New Reflections on Old Paradigms', in Urban Policy and Research, vol. 18, no. 2, 2000, pp. 159-70.

(58.) G. Pollack, 'Missing Women: Rethinking Early Thoughts on Images of Women', in C. Squiers (ed.), The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, Seattle, Bay Press, 1990, pp. 202-19.

(59.) Cited in J. Davidov, Women's Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, p. 237.

(60.) J. Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998.