Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/01/21

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Subject: [Leica] Photographing the homeless (I confess)
From: pdzwig at summaventures.com (Peter Dzwig)
Date: Sun Jan 21 15:57:09 2007
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20070119212450.00bcd080@mail.2alpha.com>

Good shot Peter, well taken...and a good discussion of your reasons. It was 
different times then.

Peter

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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In reply to: Message from pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein) ([Leica] Photographing the homeless (I confess))