The Stories We Walk By- An example of how to apply the concepts of "The danger of a single story" and visual documenting

Have you seen this blog yet? http://thestorieswewalkby.com/

The Stories We Walk By is a blog that shares a photographic narrative of the homeless of Berkeley in order to investigate and share more about the homeless living in Berkeley that we have become accustomed to passing on the way to class. This blog is interesting to be because if meshes together some of the themes that we have been talking about in class, ranging from “The Danger of a Single Story” to the week that we spent discussing visual representation of the poor. Ultimately, I want to talk more about how these discussions relate to the aim of the blog, whose authors describe as the following: “It is our hope that we can gradually transform ‘the strangers we walk by’ into ‘the stories we walk by’ and stop to listen to.” This blog is an effective example of how to complicate the way we think about poverty and what should be done about issues surrounding homelessness in Berkeley. 

The most recent post is about a jewelry seller named Joe that works on Telegraph Avenue. In the picture that the bloggers take of him, is portrayed as an active person—jewelry tools are flung about the colorful cloth that he sits on. Gems and necklaces that he has arranged fall between him and the viewer of the picture. We could consider this picture as an appropriate and ethical picture as we talked about in class in the past weeks. There is no implication that the viewer must be doing something to save Joe from his condition. He clearly has business skills, so it is clear that they viewer could meet Joe on equal footing and purchase some of his work if they wanted to. Moreover, Joe’s suffering as a homeless person is not staged, in fact he looks as though he is in the middle of working on something and this photograph happened to be snapped.

Similar to this picture, what I particularly think is useful about this blog is that it makes each story of each homeless Berkeley adult go beyond a single story. There is a tendency to think of people that live in People’s Park or the groups of guys hanging out on Telegraph Avenue as all the same. Absorbed in thoughts about class or feeling overwhelmed about how to react to the homeless, we tend not to distinguish between one homeless person and the next. In fact, this is how we may think of any of the thousands of people on the Berkeley campus that we see but do not know. We fall into the cycle of seeing Berkeley as an anonymous collection of stereotyped individuals that we simply don’t have enough time to see as anything more than this.

However, this blog brings to life certain facts that allow us to better understand who Joe is and why he is doing what he is. Something that struck me was that Joe feels that he cannot get a “normal” job because he has 5 felony counts on his record. This helps complicate the stereotype that some may hold towards homeless adults for not working. What does it say about our criminal justice system if there is no way for the accused to fully become rehabilitated in society because we have ostracized them? Joe is also educated. He has degrees in both psychology and business. This shows, as we learned in class, that captions and narratives are needed to fully contextualize pictures. From the way that Joe dresses, we may not have considered that he is better educated than most students still in the process of earning their undergraduate degrees. He also has a perspective towards life that rivals many: “Be easy. Be easy, man. Shit ain’t that serious... . Everybody’s worried about everything, but what they should be worried about is other people. People can be too self-centered.”

What would you have thought about Joe if you had just seen him on the street and not known more about him? Does this matter? What is this blog doing for those that read it, and what do you think about it? I encourage you to look through this blog and consider the images and stories of the homeless that they have interviewed. Do you agree with the mission of this blog? Do you think that it is an ethical forum?