Do We See the Homeless—Or Just the Art? →

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Street art has become common in cities, with the walls of buildings transformed into modern canvases. Photographers who capture these murals often frame more than the paint—they capture the people, too. In many cases, those people are the unhoused, blending into the backdrop of urban expression. But when that happens, what are we really seeing?

Street art includes both the image and the environment. So when someone living on the street is framed within the art, do they become part of it? Has the unnaturalness of their setting turned them into something symbolic rather than human?

Art and photography often reflect emotion and experience. But if a homeless person becomes part of the composition, part of the “story” the artist or photographer is telling—do they lose their individuality? Their humanness? Or worse, has the image taken it from them?

Colette Brooks, in In the City: Random Acts of Awareness, writes:

“A city person does not feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets.”

She was likely referring to how city dwellers learn to live amid fragmentation—coming and going, always surrounded by others yet rarely connected.

But when a homeless man appears beneath a mural in a photograph, we have to ask:
Has he become part of the art, less important as a human being than as a visual element?
Is he still seen—as an individual—or merely absorbed into the larger composition?
Will the art outlive him? Will it spark more conversation than his life ever did?

Was he included to highlight a reality, or simply to help the photographer convey a message?

In capturing the image, did we erase the man?

The question remains:
Do we truly see the homeless—or just the art?

There is no easy answer. But maybe the most important thing is that we keep asking.