Street art has become common, and buildings’ walls may be a new venue for modern art. Photographers who capture street art often include street people in their pictures. Street Art includes both the art and the people. Have the people become art because of their unnatural environment?

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, “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 likely just meant those folks are walking the sidewalks, going and coming surrounded by people but with no real connections to anyone. 

Is the homeless man now part of the street art less important as a human because he has been captured as part of the painting above? Is he still real and an individual? Will the art outlive him? Will it have more connections? Was his existence just a way for the photographer to tell us what he saw?  Did we take his "humanness" away by making him part of the picture?

The question was left with: do we see the homeless or just the art? The answer is not easy, but the question is what is essential.