Behind the Pics: "Street Mirror"
The story behind one of my photographs in my No Shenanigans Gallery
This image, “Street Mirror,” is part of my No Shenanigan’s Gallery, which includes prints I’m giving to paid subscribers for free. I’m offering a free 5”x7” matted print from my gallery to each paid subscriber. I expect to add 10 new images to the gallery over the summer, so hold tight if this one doesn’t rattle your bones.
When I launched the gallery, I promised I’d share deeper stories about each of the images in the gallery. Here is the story of this photo, taken in my Pioneer Square neighborhood in early May, 2020.
I hesitated to add this photo to my No Shenannigan’s Gallery for many reasons that I’ll confess here.
First, I don’t consider it to be among my best —not by a long shot.
Second, I can’t imagine a framed black-and-white of a bandaged foot topping the charts any time soon.
Also, my photojournalism experience is scant. Though I spent most of my camera time in the early months of Covid witnessing the effects the pandemic was having on the street communities here in Seattle, I don’t have the confidence to properly judge the photographs I captured. Those early days of Covid in the streets were often overwhelming, so my judgement of these photos is clouded.
Finally, I can’t fully articulate why “Street Mirror” stands out amongst all the hundreds of photographs that I took in that time. So it’s hard to defend its inclusion, but let me give it a try.
March, 2020: How Do the Homeless Shelter at Home?
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By March 2020, I’d been shooting the Seattle streets regularly for two years. I’d spent a fair amount of time photographing in the downtown core and the city’s mission district, where a large percentage of the city’s unhoused were located.
If you were a street photographer in downtown Seattle around 2018, one way or the other you had to deal with street people.
In the nearly four decades I’ve lived in Seattle, there had always been a visible street population. So whether or not to shoot the homeless was never a debate in my mind. They were part of the fabric of our community. Ignoring them would have been dishonest.
Looking back at my catalogs from 2017-2020, a very small percentage of my photos included street people or their shelters, but they were present enough that I had to learn how to photograph them.
Over time I cobbled together a set of rules and ethical guidelines that I did my best to follow: shoot with engagement, permission and respect. Easier said than done, but those were my rules.
When the city shut down and we were told to “shelter in place,” my first thought was, “How do you shelter at home if you don’t have a home?” My parallel thought was, “They’re fucked” — referring to the homeless.
One truth about life across the centuries and across political and economic spectrums is that during human-made crises and natural disasters, the poor and dispossessed always bear the brunt.
So I hit the streets. Every day during those first weeks of shut-down, I walked the downtown corridors, photographing and talking with people living in alleyways, vestibules, street tents, and parks.
This is the short version of what I found during those first weeks and what led me to “Street Mirror.”
The Six-Foot Rule: Where Do They Sleep?
When social distancing was instituted, the homeless shelters shut down a third of their beds and sent people to find shelter outside. While walking the streets, I’d occasionally run into front-line worker between shifts, but for the most part the only humans I met in those early days were the unhoused.
This gentleman had just moved to Seattle from Chicago the week before Covid hit to take a restaurant job. When I met him, he told me that his job had just been eliminated, and he could no longer get treatment for his fresh eye wound. He had spent the night previous sleeping in a park — a first in his life. He had no blanket, sleeping bag, or tent, only the coat he was wearing.
“The patch makes me look mean,” he said. “I don’t want people to be scared of me.”
These tents were across the street from the Union Gospel Mission, one of the city’s largest shelters. It would be nearly three years before this sidewalk — and many other Seattle sidewalks and city parks — would be cleared of tents and encampments. By 2022, tents and make-shift shelters would populate nearly every public thoroughfare in the downtown area, as well as dozens of residential neighborhoods. It was a full-blown crisis that took up ink and oxygen in the local media nearly nearly every day.
As I said, the homeless have always had a visible presence in Seattle, but until Covid hit, I’d personally never seen an open fire-pit in broad daylight.
This woman was warming water to bathe when I met her. She told me that she had just left an encampment south of downtown, in the Georgetown neighborhood, where she’d been assaulted. She had moved to this location near the sports stadiums because it was safer.
Tents immediately sprung up at Steinbrueck Park, at the northern edge of the Pike Place Market, one of the world’s most visited tourist destinations.
Shops were shuttered and virtually every vestibule in the Pioneer Square — where my studio is located, and where most of the shelters and social service centers for the homeless are located—was transformed into a shelter.
Where Do They Go When They Have to Go?
A week into the pandemic, I pitched a photo essay to every publication in town. An editor at Real Change, Seattle’s 20-year-old street paper, was the only one who replied. The weekly is distributed by vendors who are homeless, and the paper has been a long-time advocate homeless rights.
There was a certain shock aspect to my pitch: I included several explicit images of drug use and human excrement — subject matters that I didn’t normally seek out and would obviously not consider portfolio-enhancers, but these weren’t normal times. I was shocked at the depth of neglect that I was seeing, and I wanted the larger Seattle community to see it unfiltered.
“We don’t publish photos of junkies or shit,” the editor emailed me. He wanted to publish the essay, but some of the images needed to go.
Although the paper’s office was located in the heart of the mission district where many of my photos were taken, he and the staff were now working remotely and were not privy to the neighborhood as I was experiencing it.
“Everything is closed,” I replied. “The police and clean-up crews abandoned the neighborhood. These images are happening in the open. I’m not trying to be sensational, but this is what’s happening in broad daylight.”
He published the essay with toilet paper roll pic, and the newspaper became one of the important advocates for the emergency installation of portable toilets throughout the city.
The governor’s shelter-at-home order came on March 23, by which time most of the city’s retail business were shuddered. This set of public toilets at Pike Market was installed on April 16. During that first month, the downtown alleyways had become open sewer pits.
Breaking Rules
These are types of photographs that I find repulsive, but I admit to taking them.
“Homeless Porn.” That’s what these are. A photographer sees someone passed out in the street or in a decrepit condition and takes a top-down shot without any engagement or permissions and moves on. Their Instagram post gets a bunch of “So Sad” comments.
In those early weeks of Covid, except for the Instagram posting part, I broke that rule too many times. I didn’t think subtlety would have an impact. The downtown was completely abandoned by the police, shopkeepers, pedestrians, shoppers, emergency workers — you name it. The guardrails that regulated the public spheres were now gone and those sheltering at home needed to see what was happening in their city.
To be clear, the majority of folks sleeping in the streets were just trying to get by; they were not shooting up or passing out on the sidewalks. But there were enough who were, and the only witnesses were other homeless people and the front-line service workers at the shelters. I felt justified in breaking my rules in the spirit of witnessing.
This man had gathered more than two dozen “empty” syringes from a nearby park and “married” them into a single syringe, which he used to shoot himself with. He’s here sitting on a stoop in full sight of what was just a few weeks earlier was a busy shopping thoroughfare.
As the Covid weeks turned to months and then years, and as the downtown core remained empty of its office workers and shoppers, open drug use was normalized.
The Good News?
One of the surprising developments as the pandemic wore on was that the predictions of widespread infection among the homeless never came to fruition.
One theory, which a few homeless folks shared with me, was that the years of street-living had given them antibodies that made them more resistant to Covid. In fact, I can’t count how many people I met in those early days who boasted of being fearless in the face of the pandemic because they never caught a cold or the flu, or had never needed vaccinations for any disease.
With all respect, that’s a tough theory to accept. The average life expectancy of a person living in the streets is about 45 years — almost three decades lower than people who are housed. That doesn’t sound like strong antibodies at work to me.
The theory I subscribed to based on conversations with service workers and my own observations was that people living in the streets don’t normally congregate indoors in large numbers, except to sleep. During the days, they remain mostly outside where they stay to themselves or in small groups, a practice that contributed to the low infection rates.
Back to the Beginning: Why This Photo?
It was an early Saturday morning, gray and drizzling. The Pioneer Square neighborhood was empty. As I walked from my car toward First Avenue, I saw the man attached to these feet standing before a window and staring down into the glass. He remained unmoving for the entire time it took me to walk the two blocks to reach him.
It was a pose I’ve come to see dozens, maybe hundreds, of times in the streets since, but this was one of the first: a man or a woman on a high — alone, zoned out, catatonic in their own world.
When I reached him, he turned his head to me and nodded, and I got my knees and took the picture. It’s all I could do — preserve a moment that possibly no one else in this world had noticed.
When I began this essay, I felt confident I’d figure out why this image encapsulates those first weeks of Covid for me. I was wrong. Maybe I’ll find the words one day, or maybe not.
In the meantime, thank you for reading.
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I want to reach across the virtual divide that separates us and offer something tangible, something meaningful to me that I’ve created with my own hands and that you can hold with yours. It’s old-school, I get it. And it costs me a little bit to do this, but your support means means everything to me. so let’s give this a try
Powerful and thought provoking work here, Mark. Congratulations for giving this subject a voice!
We were (and still are) in a similar situation over here in the UK.
This is a remarkable piece. Very moving and powerful. So well written and the photos are excellent. Well done, Mark!