NOWHERE TO CALL HOME

The faces and voices of people living on the street are revealed in intimate detail in this searing collection of photographs and interviews.

For her fourth volume of literary-pictorial studies of homelessness, den Bok photographed street people in Toronto; Washington, D.C.; and Brisbane, Australia, while her father, Tim, asked questions about their lives and hardships, all in exchange for a $10 payment. Some of their hard-luck narratives have a picaresque specificity: Bill faced eviction because creditors seized his bank account; Ken went bankrupt four times because of his business partners’ drug addictions, a malicious prosecution, and a perfidious woman; Vaughan, an electrician, was homeless by choice because it was cheap and he disliked working. A few people are totally opaque—“Rick seems to be almost completely nonverbal, communicating more with grunts than with words”—while others recall a hazy rut of misfortune, substance abuse, and mental illness. The author’s subjects are articulate about the travails of homelessness, discussing in detail the pitfalls of shelter systems where fighting, theft, and bedbugs are rampant; strategies for surviving Toronto’s frigid winters—find a steam grate to camp over—and the havoc that Covid-19 lockdowns wrought on public bathroom access. (“They wouldn’t even let me use the emergency washrooms” at a hospital, complains Dana. “I was basically treated like an animal.”) Emotional deprivations are just as bitter: Many people talk of their loneliness and estrangement from relatives and of the hole in the heart left by a child they cannot see.

Den Bok’s black-and-white portraits—extreme close-ups that highlight caked dirt and every spike of stubble—are arresting. They include aging King Lears who sport unkempt beards and wild white hair, with one pointing an accusing finger pistol-style at the camera; women with pleading eyes, their creased, spotted faces a road map of wrong turns; and younger men shrouded in blankets and hoodies, half-seen and menacing. Her renditions of her subjects’ conversations seem artless, but in fact she deftly arranges their ramblings into telling evocations of their characters and predicaments. Their soliloquies are sometimes sheer madness—“I fought against Hitler….I fought in Canada because most of it was Chinese….I was a five-star general, a fifteen-star general”—and at other times prosaic accounts of the chaos of mere poverty. (“So, um, I moved to Brampton, and the landlord ended up, ah, screwing over all the tenants, and, ah, he ended up getting a written notice but didn’t tell us tenants, and, ah, we all ended up on the streets on, ah, Christmas.”) Often, they meet in the middle, where people dimly recognize the roles their misfiring behaviors played in their blighted lives. (“I’m, ah…I try to get off the streets,” says Mary Ellen. “I try every day now. Yeah, I…you know, when I was…I don’t know what I’m doing. But mostly in the summer I…I don’t know if it’s some sort of drug I got into….I’m getting into fights every other day.”) Yet as extreme as their circumstances and dysfunctions are, den Bok’s subjects voice yearnings—says Cory of his 13-year-old daughter, “I’d like to see her. I haven’t been having much luck….Oh well! Things are getting better. Things will always get better”—that readers will find heartbreakingly familiar.

A gripping combination of haunting photos and plangent stories full of almost unbearably raw humanity.