[Leica] Photographing the homeless (I confess)

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

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