A journey through city streets tends to be a minor series of momentary encounters and the person huddled on the pavement or sleeping there under cardboard becomes another part of an urban montage. The ephemeral nature of street life discourages too much reflection on what is seen amid ever-moving crowds and for preoccupied pedestrians the homeless figure can seem just one part of a street’s furniture; indeterminate docility as likely to provoke ignoble thoughts about their plight as it is to evoke compassion or sorrow. We pass on our way.
Street photography is often enraptured by the fleetingness of its subject matter but the pavement as a theatre of change and motion is not what Marc Davenant’s camera seeks to capture. Photography has borrowed many of its genres from pictorial arts of earlier ages and two of these, portraiture and still life, provide a more apt way of appreciating his achievement. Davenant is not exercised by “the jittery flow of events as they unfold” – Jeff Wall’s take on street photography – responding instead to those who remain stationary and turn a small part of public urban space into a provisional habitat.
Davenant’s crowd-funded Outsiders is a photobook about homeless men and women and also their stories, told by themselves: their names, backgrounds, how and why they live on the street or in temporary accommodation of an appallingly substandard kind. What hurts them most is not discomfort, hostility, cold or hunger but the daily experience of being ignored and regarded as worthless.
The book is the result of six years working with those experiencing homelessness, building their trust and gaining their consent to be part of his project. The photographs are arresting, challenging cognitive fatigue about a social issue that is tangibly present on the streets of our cities. With the number of people without a home of their own reaching record highs in Ireland, it matters not that they happen to have been taken in the UK. Acknowledge the homeless, says Davenant, “make eye contact, and share some time and kind words. They are people, and a little human interaction can make an enormous difference to an existence that is otherwise bleak.”
