...Taking photographs of the homeless is a gamble. Quite a few homeless people are unstable psychologically. The homeless are homeless for a variety of reasons. Taking pictures of the homeless, is preying on a segment of society that cannot protect itself in the most obvious of ways that we, ourselves, can. It is a marginalized part of our culture that society does not fully address as much as it needs to.
This is spot-on. Walking among and interacting with inner-city homeless folks is much like swimming with sharks. Most of the time they'll just check you out for the sake of curiosity. Once in a while one will try to eat you.
This was a tragic incident.
I was a cop for 30 years and worked areas with large homeless populations for several years.
Those of us who are financially capable of owning and using cameras live in a much different world than those who are being photographed on the street. When you venture into that world, you abandon the relatively safe world you (we) live in, and enter into a very dark, violent, and different world where people are beaten or killed for blankets, half a bottle of booze, or a misplaced insult. It is an unseen war zone that is nestled, hidden and forgotten, inside every city in the US. In that world there are only predators and victims. They all try to get along the best they can, but they're merely existing. No one "lives" in that world in the traditional sense as we here contemplate "living."
People who live on the streets are unpredictable and do not share the societal norms that those of us who post here take for granted. When you take to the streets to photograph that world, you leave the
relative safety of "our" world behind, and you enter "their" world. If you're going to be in that world, you need to be prepared to become a part of that world and all that entails. If you don't have the survival skills to successfully navigate "their" world, then you probably ought not be there.
ON EDIT: It's also important to remember that our jails and prisons are now the largest mental-health provider systems in the country, and that for many of the homeless, particularly those with severe mental health issues, our jails and prisons (as bad as they are) are a much better, safer (for them,) and preferable place to be than on the street.
