Homeless are Now, Part of the Art

Street art has become common and the walls of buildings may be a new venue for modern art.  The same photographers that capture street art often include in their pictures the street people.  Art and photography can inform us and tell us what is being felt.  If the homeless have blended into and become part of the art have they lost their humanness? Did the photographer take it from them?

Colette Brooks wrote the book, “In the City: Random Acts of Awareness”, She said, “that a city person is one who doesn't 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 likely just meant those folks walking the sidewalks going and coming to work. Surrounded with people but no real connections. 

Is this homeless man less important as a human now captured as part of the painting above? Is he still real and an individual? Was his presence just a way for the photographer to tell us what he saw?  Did we take his "humanness" away from him by making him part of the picture? Do we see the homeless? Maybe this is the overall message?

I am not saying the answers are easy but the questions are important.