[Leica] Photographing the homeless (I confess)

[firkin at ncable.net.au (Alastair Firkin)]

Very interesting and honest discussion: good image as well. In  
Australia, the wino/bum tag was accurate in 1972 as well. I worked in  
South Melbourne at Prince Henry Hospital, surrounded by Alco's We too  
now have the combination of Mental institutions to add to the  
"homeless" along with a remarkable number of children.

Cheers
On 20/01/2007, at 18:11, Peter Klein wrote:

> The discussion of Kyle's commandment made me revisit a picture I  
> took almost 35 years ago.
>
> It was early spring, my freshman year of college.  One weekend  
> morning, I woke up early (a rare occurrence). It was very foggy,  
> and I thought I might snag a moody picture or two.  So I decided to  
> go out shooting before breakfast.  I walked through Boston's Back  
> Bay, over Beacon Hill and ended up in the plaza at Government  
> Center.  I turned a corner and literally almost stumbled upon this  
> scene:
>
> http://users.2alpha.com/~pklein/oldpics/homeless72.htm
>
> I remember looking at them, at my camera, and for a second  
> thinking, "should I?"  I felt a little funny about it.  And scared,  
> too--there was nobody in the plaza but them and me.  But I also  
> felt like I had found something I wanted to preserve.  I shot  
> several frames, at various angles.  They didn't wake up, probably  
> more due to their blood alcohol level than the quietness of my M2's  
> shutter.
>
> Now remember, this was 1972.  We didn't call men like this  
> "homeless" then, we called them winos or bums.  This was before the  
> wholesale emptying of U.S. mental institutions onto the streets by  
> an unholy alliance of mental illness rights advocates, anti-social  
> service crusaders and budget-balancing bureaucrats.  The homeless  
> that an 18 year-old Boston college student saw were mostly hard- 
> core alcoholics.  They weren't really on our socially-conscious  
> radar, which was more attuned to Vietnam, civil rights and poverty  
> caused by racism or "the system," not the bottle.
>
> It was also just a few months after another practitioner of the  
> depicted lifestyle had stolen my backpack containing my DR  
> Summicron from right behind me as I photographed in the Boston  
> Public Gardens (I got it back a week later because I city employee  
> knew the culprit and figured that the bright red nylon  
> mountaineer's backpack he was carrying wasn't actually his).   
> Ironically, that same lens was on my M2.  But I only thought of  
> that long afterward.
>
> I chose the frame I printed on a visual basis, not a sociological  
> one.  Other frames showed all three of the men in the window box  
> "sleeping it off," along with their half-empty whisky bottles.  But  
> this one (the closest I got) showed a scattering of shoes, a torn  
> elbow, the texture of a beard and stone.  I liked the picture then,  
> and I still like it now.
>
> To this day, I'm not entirely sure of my motivations in taking the  
> picture.  But I can tell you that there was no self-important inner  
> declaration, no "Hey, I can take a socially conscious photo."  I  
> did feel a bit like an intruder.  I felt some sympathy for the men,  
> along with disgust.  I felt a little white-liberal guilty.  But  
> mostly, I saw a photo, so I took it.
>
> --Peter
>
>
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