Description:
domestic life; transportation; Homeless; poverty; Family; man; women; child; girl; boy; living in car
Label Text:
Mary Ellen Mark knew that she was going to be a photographer the first time she held a camera in her hands. She later studied photojournalism in Philadelphia. She does not snap spontaneous pictures on the street or “steal a shot”; she wants to get to know her subjects first and become part of their life, if only for a short time. As they are not posing for a stranger, her subjects move and behave more naturally in front of her camera. Mark also tends to choose difficult subjects, those on the fringes of society: prostitutes, mental patients, and the homeless. She would become quite involved with her subjects, and remained in contact with this particular family long after the week of shooting their daily life. In these images for Life Magazine in 1987, she captures “the incredible stress of not knowing where you’re going to be next.” HKDV
“A Week in the Life of a Homeless Family” (excerpt), Life Magazine, December 1987
The Damm family: Crissy, six; Jesse, four; their mother, Linda, 27, a former nursing-home aide; and their stepfather, Dean, 33, an ex-trucker.
Once a family is homeless, they are likely to encounter discrimination when they seek emergency shelter. In Los Angeles, for example, only 51 of the county’s 215 shelters accept families, and of those only 16 accept families with fathers. Though homeless individuals often live outside—on sidewalks, on park benches, beneath freeway overpasses—homeless families are more likely to be hidden from the public eye, living marginally from night to night in shelters, welfare hotels and cars.
When the Damms moved to California a month ago, the car transported, housed and even subsidized them. … They left Colorado on September 6 with $80 in cash and everything they owned stuffed into the trunk. The children bounced up and down, excited by the adventure. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ran out by the time they crossed the California border. The money ran out by the time they got to Victorville. Dean panhandled $5, which bought enough gas to get to Palmdale, where they sold eight rock tapes for $3. They rolled into the San Fernando Valley the night of September 8 with an empty gas tank and less than 10 cents.
Dean had been promised a job with a trucking company, but the offer was rescinded because he had no phone number where he could be contacted. “It’s a bitch,” says Dean. “You can’t get a job unless you have a phone. You can’t get a phone unless you have an apartment. You can’t get an apartment unless you have a job.” Before the Damms were admitted to the Valley Shelter, which they had heard was one of the safest in Los Angeles, they moved seven times in 15 days, staying in their car or in cheap motels patronized by prostitutes and junkies, for which they were given short-term vouchers by social service agencies. These agencies also sometimes gave them bags of food, but much of it was inedible, as it needed to be cooked. They opened the cans with a knife and ate with their hands.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1997.10 |
