Homelessness is omnipresent in America.
While there are many talented photographers documenting the homeless with good
intention, it has become overexposed, exploitative, and redundant; a genre
within itself. Street people, desperate and often addicted, don’t want their
hard-luck lives recorded. They are both humbled and ashamed by their status;
they did not choose to live on the streets. I set out to photograph not the
homeless, but rather the public reaction to being accosted by the homeless.
I’m walking with the aid of a second-hand walker with green tennis balls on the hind feet. I’m wearing beat-up Levi’s and a hoody. I have an old army green canvas backpack tied to the walker. I have an orange plastic bucket which I flip over for a place to sit. I scrape the walker over sidewalk stars and come face to face with humankind. I am seventy-three years old and crippled by time and old spinal injuries. I fit the profile of a vagabond. I yell at people, HEY, LOOK AT ME, and make reaction pictures with plastic disposable film cameras. My performance is met at times with compassion and at other times with animosity.
Stress and anxiety are at an all-time high.
Violence and seething hate have become the status quo. Xenophobia, white
supremacy, and gender bashing have elbowed into the main. My need to create
something worth creating hasn’t abated and I’m still dreaming of immortality.
In the guise of a fucked-up old white guy, I document attitudes and behavior in
times of an American Civil War.
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