November 7, 2024 | Rome, Italy

Poverty Dept.

By |2024-06-23T22:37:18+02:00May 31st, 2024|Viewfinder|
Rice and beans.

Occasionally a current event breathes new life into a forgotten time. In 1992, I spent a considerable period with homeless people on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. I had come there to work with an unusual theater company whose mission was to offer performance workshops for residents of this infamously-named 50-block neighborhood, which, then as now, claims one of the nation’s highest concentration of homeless people.

Some of them I befriended. I listened to stories. I took notes. I also took photographs, many of which languished in my private archive, perhaps because they were so precious to me.

I reveal them now in light of the recent landmark decision made by the American Supreme Court, “Johnson v Grants Pass,” which affects the lives of homeless people across the country, extending to them the protection of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, ruling that it is “cruel and unusual punishment” to arrest or ticket people for sleeping in public spaces when they have no other safe place to go.

The verdict heartened me enough to fish out these images of people, faces and scenes from the downtrodden Los Angeles of three decades ago. The images may be old, but their plight is not.

About the Author:

Born and raised in New York City, Betsy has worked as a journalist for a variety of newspapers including the Cody Enterprise in Wyoming and the New York Daily News. Photography has played an important role in her storytelling and a clunky Nikon ranks among her favorite companions. A French citizen, she lives in rural Normandy with her blacksmith husband and two Potcake dogs rescued from the streets of Guadeloupe.