Sleeping on the Streets

[T]here is no recovery from the economic crisis for the people who live on the streets. Every night on the sidewalks and under the freeways people are hungry and sleep where they can spread a blanket, and Vinny Pannizzo left the university when he couldn’t turn away.
For fifteen years, every night he bags food and then distributes it from his van to homeless people in Oakland.
These photographs provide a reality check on life for the poorest people in U.S. cities. Maybe they will help create more Vinny Pannizzos.

Q&A with David Bacon

Photography is…

“Photography was not meant as art to adorn walls, but rather to make obvious the ancestral cruelty of man against man, the greatness of his love for things and everyday things.” This is a quote from the great Mexican street photographer Nacho López. Alexandr Rodchenko said somthing similar – “We must take photographs from every angle but the navel, until all those points of view are recognised.”

Photography and writing…

Photography and writing are powerful when they are combined to give us a broader understanding and context – a deeper reality check. Separating photography and words often means depoliticizing photographs.

Who left the biggest impression on you?

Otto Hagel and Hansel Meith, two photographers who fled Germany in the 1930s, and then became committed documentary photographers of the social movements of the 1930s and 40s in California. They believed that photographers should be participants in the movements and lives of the people they document.

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David Bacon (www.dbacon.igc.org) is a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013), documents forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. A previous book, Communities Without Borders (Cornell/ILR Press, 2006), documents migration through the eyes and words of transnational communities.

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