August 2003
I Shoot the Street People
Robert L. Terrell
I photograph urban street people.
They include the poor, the homeless, the diseased, the addicted, the disabled, the underemployed, the unemployed and those on the verge of losing control of their brains, bodies and basic dignity. I have been engaged in such photography for almost 40 years, and I have shot street people in major cities around the world, including Abidjan, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Monrovia, Mogadishu, Nairobi, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Paris.
I shoot people and situations as they are. None of my shots are posed. I never pay people for their photographs. But sometimes I give money to those I shoot, not in payment but because I understand at least a portion of their dilemma. I also understand that the economic and political systems that govern our lives are such that almost any one of us could end up on the streets in similarly desperate circumstances.
Whenever I take a photograph, I am trying to capture something unique or special about the human being I am shooting. When I am successful, the shot eliminates some portion of the social, cultural and psychological distance between the person being photographed and the rest of us.
Excellent photographs help us better understand ourselves and our society. I want those who view my photographs to see what I see, from my perspective, and in the way that I see it.
I want them to bear witness with me, to share the haunting, bittersweet empathy that surges through my mind and body each and every time I encounter some new form of public suffering.
In addition, I want viewers to share the burden of recognition that the images presented here are not of or about someone else.
These photographs depict us.
Moreover, they clearly indicate in an undeniable manner that in San Francisco far too many of us, including women and children, subsist in brutal, degrading circumstances that are abysmal at best. I have been shooting San Francisco street people and hustlers for more than 30 years, and intensively during the past 12. During that time, I have noticed numerous, deeply troubling changes in the character of life on the streets, and the manner in which local residents relate to it.
For example, compared to ten years ago there are fewer beggars bearing signs indicating that they have AIDS. Death and better drug treatment regimes are likely responsible.
There are also fewer "bag ladies" on the streets today than there were when I started this photography project.
They used to be ubiquitous in the downtown area. Armed with overflowing bags and dressed in ill-fitting layers of multicolored clothing, bag ladies were ominous reminders of the fate that will befall far too many of us as we age and lose control of our finances and mental facilities.
Bag ladies are still to be found, mumbling incoherently to themselves as they wander aimlessly from gutter to gutter, alone and essentially ignored. I don't remember ever seeing homeless, Asians on the streets at the beginning of the last decade. But they are there today, both males and females, including a disturbingly large number of people who are old enough to be retired. The sight of them groping methodically through garbage cans and trash containers for bottles, cans and edible food belies the commonly accepted assertion that all Asians Americans are upwardly mobile, and completely self-sufficient.
In previous decades, excluding long term alcoholics, those engaged in curbside begging typically appeared on the streets for a few weeks or months and then disappeared. It was, therefore, relatively easy to assume at the constantly changing cast of ragged participants was largely composed of unfortunate individuals, who were only temporarily down on their luck.
The rambling tales of woe presented by those seeking "spare change" were almost always fashioned around some catastrophic event that had left the supplicant in need of emergency assistance. It is possible that those who told such stories actually believed their fortunes would change for the better if they could only manage to acquire a few more dollars at the bottom of a begging cup.
People know better today. By now, it is abundantly obvious to anyone who have given the matter serious thought that homelessness, and all the social ills that it represents, has rather quickly evolved in a permanent feature of life in the United States. Although the phenomenon exists in every sector of society, including small towns and rural areas, it is most egregiously apparent in major metropolitan cities such as San Francisco. Moreover, contemporary homeless culture has taken on an entrenched, permanent dimension that didn't exist in the past.
Thus, today's beggars are far better organized, and more widely dispersed, than were their predecessors. Some have regular hours, and many of them have apparently acquired first use rights to favored locations that tend to be honored by their counterparts. Arrangements of this sort are indicative of the overall structure of the expanding culture of the city's beggars, vast number of whom are also homeless.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that many of those who currently practice the curbside art of earning a living with a tin or Styrofoam cup work regular hours. Finely attuned to the moods and movements of the comparatively affluent pedestrians that flow in predictable waves up and down the city' s commercial thoroughfares, they are supremely adept at being in the right places at the right times.
On regular workdays, they situate themselves along the perimeters of the most crowded corridors along which potential donors must pass in order to get to and from work. Many of them maintain their positions with particular vigilance during the noon hour in order to attract the attention and donations of workers on their way to or from lunch.
Beggars who are particularly confrontational sit or stand in front of restaurant entrances, where they systematically guilt trip each person entering or leaving the establishment. Others set up operations as close as possible to street side ATM machines. Their haunting, vacant stares follow each person as he or she steps away from the cash belching machines. Sometimes they ask for donations, but mostly they stare.
Most beggars fold up their signs, retrieve their cups and move off in search of move comfortable settings at the end of the evening rush hour. The regulars work shorter hours on the weekends, except those who frequent the sections of the city which teem with tourists on a daily basis.
Thus, beggars, and an expanding variety of street hustlers, work the crowds seven days per week at popular locations such as Union Square, Giardelli Square, Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown and North Beach. I might note that 10 years ago the people who resided on San Francisco's streets were much less aggressive than those who do so today. Moreover, many of those who are out there today are dangerously angry. I have had numerous dangerous encounters in recent years that could have proven life threatening had I not managed to defuse them via hasty retreats. I never had such encounters during my first years on the streets.
I might also note that the level of violence directed at homeless people is also higher than it was a decade or so ago. Accounts of rapes, beatings and other forms of physical violence are easy to come by. In a few particularly horrible instances, sleeping homeless people have been set afire. Murders are not uncommon. Innocent bystanders are also victims of the violence that plagues the community of homeless people. But violence, and fears engendered by its constant presence, is not the primary source of escalating concern in the larger community about the so-called "homeless problem." Rather, people seem to be more concerned about the negative impact on the overall environment that inevitably results from thousands of people living on the streets.
They complain mightily about the sight of people defecating in public, urinating in doorways, sleeping on sidewalks and The point to be understood is that municipal reservoirs of goodwill are clearly running toward empty. The Care Not Cash initiative recently passed overwhelmingly by San Francisco's generally liberal voters is indicative of the frustration and hostility that many municipal residents share regarding homeless people.
If implemented, the Care Not Cash program, which is currently tied up in the courts, will produce a catastrophic reduction in the financial assistance for the city's poorest.
Opponents of the controversial initiative made this point as best they could before the vote was taken, but to no avail. Advocates of so-called "tough love" are in the majority, and they are obviously intent on making life tougher still for the city's poorest residents.
Whether they admit it or not, those who support get tough approaches to the homeless are united in their wish that the people who embody the problem would just cooperate and go away. Given the fact that thousands of cities around the nation are pursuing the same strategy, it obviously cannot succeed. Such approaches will, however, succeed in increasing the amount of misery experienced by those least able to defend themselves.
In any event one of the best indications San Francisco's homeless culture has acquired an element of de facto permanence is the fact that many of those who currently reside on our streets have been doing so for years. There is nothing temporary about their situation. For them, street side living and curbside begging, are as integral to their way-of-life as are commuting and cutting the grass are for those lucky enough to live comfortably in the more economically secure sectors of town.
Moreover, it is abundantly clear by now that a huge proportion of those who currently reside on the city's streets do not anticipate experiencing notable improvements in their situation for the foreseeable future.
As a result, the culture of homelessness and street living is changing in ways that are subtle, but extremely important. For example, during the early years of the last decade, San Francisco's homeless tended to be kept on the move. They were generally permitted to hang out at given locations for a few hours or days, but they were invariably forced to keep moving.
The places where they were permitted to sleep during the day tended to be restricted to areas not frequented by tourists and affluent residents of the community. As a result, many people were able to live as if homelessness was a minor irritant, relegated most often to the least desirable sections of the city,
All the while, the number of people trolling the city's street with vacant eyes and unsteady steps and shopping overflowing carts escalated. In order to maintain the delusional fantasy that homelessness was a temporary problem resulting from bad personal choices made by inadequate people, ruthlessly efficient squads of police officers were regularly dispatched to roust the inhabitants of incipient settlements.
Police officers were also frequently deployed to locations where homeless people were beginning to acquire critical mass in order to disrupt their activities, dismantle their encampments and keep them moving, preferably out of town.
Police officers were instructed to specifically target the shopping carts commonly used by homeless people. As a result, they confiscated shopping carts and their jumbled contents. Such tactics obviously had a tremendously disruptive impact on the already unstable lives of the homeless.
Nonetheless, such tactics, including others that are even more draconian, have not rid the city of homeless people. Nor have they appreciably diminished the rate at which the municipal population of homeless people is growing.
As a result, an important psychological shift may be in the works. The sheer numbers of people living and dying on the streets is inexorably forcing municipal authorities, and the community at large, to accept the fact that they are, for the time being, a permanent segment of the city's residents.
The permanent nature of their presence is registered in numerous ways. For example, during the past couple years homeless people have begun to establish semi-permanent encampments. Some reside in pitched tents that they rarely move. Others store their goods under cardboard, or in abandoned wooden containers. Crude hovels composed of plastic sheeting and rough hewn found objects are being constructed and lived in under freeway overpasses, in culverts and along train tracks in several sections of the city.
Rarely used, out-of-the-way sections of the city's parks and roadway medians have been used in this fashion for several years. But recently semi-permanent encampments filled with homeless people have sprouted along heavily traveled thoroughfares. It is an interesting development that may prove to be the forerunner of Third World-style shantytowns.
There were numerous stories and editorials in the broadcast media and local, mainstream newspapers during the height of the dot com boom about the disproportionately large number of black and Hispanic people who were being forced to leave San Francisco because of the escalating cost of housing. During the period, many residents of the Tenderloin, the Mission, Hunters Point and other notably poor sections of town were terrified at the prospect of being displaced by gentrification. And they had good reason to be fearful.
Using predatory, speculative skills developed by their predecessors over decades, young, well-heeled dot comers, who sometimes referred to themselves as "urban pioneers," invaded such neighborhoods with barely concealed stealth and hard to resist wealth. Tens of thousands of poor people were forced out of their homes and neighborhoods.
More of them than anyone is willing to acknowledge were forced to leave the city, and a huge number of them ended up on the streets. Even though the dot com boom has morphed into a major recession, and the local supply of affordable rental housing is greater than it was just two years ago, the process of relentless gentrification continues.
One of the most important results is that working-class people in every section of town are experiencing unprecedented financial pressures. Those most severely affected commonly speak about their lives in ways that suggest that they have begun to see themselves as members of something akin to an endangered species.
Although poor people of color are experiencing gentrification in a particularly harsh manner, working-class whites are not immune. One of the best indications that this is the case is the relatively large number of them who have ended up on the city's streets in recent years with their poverty stricken black, Latino, Native American and Asian counterparts.
A particularly notable change has taken place in San Francisco's political climate regarding the homeless during the past decade or so. There is a sense of frustration and hostility incorporated into political discussions of the matter that didn't exist in the recent past. As a result, those who advocate reasoned dialogue, compassionate assistance and more balanced and coherent services are being ostentatiously ignored.
During the time I have been engaged in this photography project, each new mayor has entered City Hall promising to do something significant to ameliorate the homeless problem. Some have fashioned their plans around police tactics, and others have sought to enhance the effectiveness of Social Service agencies, public and private. Whether Liberal or Conservative, none of them has made much of a dent in the problem.
Moreover, with the passage of each year the homeless problem has weighed ever heavier on the hearts of the city residents. As a matter of fact, excepting AIDS, during the past decade or so homelessness has probably consumed more time and attention in San Francisco than any other social problem.
It is difficult to get through a day in the city without hearing several people mention the problem. Many people say they want the city government to "solve" the problem, and, to their credit, municipal authorities have deployed an impressive variety of approaches to the problem.
But, as indicated, none of them have worked-if eliminating the problem of homeless is the objective. Millions of dollars have been spent, resources have been deployed and numerous persons, including some Mayors have lost their jobs specifically because of the problem. Nonetheless, it persists.
Moreover, it is obviously getting larger as more and more people lose economic viability and crash on the streets, alive, but frequently bereft of money, hope and direction.
My best sense is that the homeless problem can not be solved at the municipal level because its sources extend beyond the reach and authority of municipalities such as San Francisco. More could be accomplished if the problem were addressed on a regional or state basis, but even that approach would ultimately prove to be inadequate.
The Federal Government is the only agency with sufficient clout and the resources to devise and implement the kind of comprehensive measures needed. But there is obviously little will in Washington these days to eliminate this complicated social cancer.
I intend to continue shooting until the problem is eliminated because I believe my photographs constitute a valuable documentary record of one of the most important social problems facing our society. Assuming the best, my photographs will serve as catalysts that move the hearts and minds of those who view them in ways that leave them committed to joining the struggle to eliminate homelessness and other forms of public suffering.
I also intend to keep shooting because I feel a deep need to produce a visual record of this preventable human tragedy.
Assuming the best, my photographs will highlight the moral and ethical culpability of those who do nothing to eliminate the problem while residing in relative comfort among hapless victims of our ruthlessly exclusionary economic system.