week 3 assignment critique

3 photos, and critical critique
selected from the books by Margaret Morton:

from left:

the tunnel 1995

transitory gardens 1993



fragile dwellings 2000

My critique goes something like this:

Margaret Morton's photographs are beyond art. They are documentation. Therefore the critique presented is taken with a grain of salt, because of the underlying subject matter.

for these photos-

The photo from Fragile dwellings, I liked the angle, and the backround feel of the city at large, as well knowing where the space lies in proximity to the bridge. The black and white photo style, again lends itself to shadow and rawness in all three photos.

For The Tunnels, I admire the light effects. All this photo is missing is the stench of the tunnels. That sweet-sour smell of decay and garbage, with metallic and wet mixed in for good measure.

Transitory Gardens, is great portraiture. Margaret Morton studies her subject in his own standing, which is important, and captures the pride.

week 3 assignment

3 photos, and critical critique
selected from the books by Margaret Morton:

from left:

transitory gardens 1993

the tunnel 1995

fragile dwellings 2000

Fragile Dwelling
Photographs and text
by Margaret Morton
Introduction by Alan Trachtenberg

[Aperture, fall 2000]
128 pages, 90 photographs

A portion of the proceeds from the book, Fragile Dwelling, will benefit Coalition for the Homeless, New York.

You may drive by here and see that they are shabby, but I think that if you look again you see this person took the time to build a place that could be comfortable for himself. If you saw it up close, you could see that we’d turned it into a home. . . . The person who will take the time to build for himself is the person who still has an interest in himself.
— Douglas, resident of the East River encampment

Over a ten-year period, Margaret Morton documented the inventive ways in which homeless people in New York City have created not only places to live but communities offering a sense of pride, place, and individuality. Fragile Dwelling depicts a world immediately recognizable to anyone who has lived in, or even visited, a major American city. Yet these photographs tell a story far more profound than most of us, streaming past on our way from home to office, would ever imagine. Together with compelling oral histories recorded by the photographer, they demand that we confront not only the bleak consequences of economic inequality in America, but also the diverse and wonderful humanity of those who, in the midst of a booming housing market for developers, strive to create shelters for themselves from the most meager resources.

To Morton, these assemblages of crates, scrap wood, broken furniture, and other debris of the modern city are not an eyesore to be quickly glimpsed and then forgotten. They are in fact, as she shows us, homes—laboriously and ingeniously built, little by little, piece by piece. Most of these structures exist no longer—whether vacated as a result of changing economic conditions, destroyed by arson, or razed by police bulldozers.

In these photographs we visit Mr. Lee, a Chinese immigrant whose house,
a perpetual work-in-progress, was constructed without the aid of boards or nails, instead held together by an elaborate system of knots. We meet the residents of Bushville in lower Manhattan, whose improvised casitas, with their porches and flags and decorations, recall the Puerto Rican villages where many of them were born. We meet a community perched along the seawall between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, where residents look out over a peaceful, luminous East River.

The river offered me the first stability I’ve had since 1988. From here you can see the mistakes you made, you can see the things that led you to be here.
— Mizan, resident of the East River encampment

Within these miraculous constructions we find people sustained in exceedingly difficult times by an abiding faith: faith in their ability to make something of value from their lives and their surroundings; faith in the power of community; religious faith sometimes.

When you want something, no matter if it weighs two hundred pounds or three hundred, you can carry, because God helps you. With God you can carry everything.
— Hector, resident of Bushville

Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Grey Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of numerous books on photography including Reading American Photographs: Image as History, From Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (Hill &Wang). He writes and lectures often on American literature, photography, and cultural history.

Reviews for exhibitions of Fragile Dwelling

Other books: The Tunnel, Transitory Gardens

Fragile Dwelling has been partially supported by The Buhl Foundation, Coalition for the Homeless, and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Margaret Morton's ongoing project has been partially supported by grants from the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

The Tunnel
Margaret Morton

[Yale University Press, fall 1995]
160 pages, 60 photographs

One of the oldest surviving homeless communities in New York City stretches for two and a half miles underground on the Upper West Side. Hidden from public view in an abandoned freight tunnel, this habitation existed for sixteen years before it was discovered by Amtrak crews renewing track for passenger service between Pennsylvania Station and Albany. Most of the residents of the fifty-block-long community refused to leave, and the population has continued to increase as the more visible homeless encampments are demolished by the city.

The earliest tunnel residents live alongside the tracks in cinderblock structures originally built as storage facilities. More recent tunnel dwellers have built plywood shanties or perched themselves on narrow ledges. Shafts of light angle through air vents. Dwellings are clustered around these points of entry and on the light-washed walls are images and writing left by graffiti artists.

An underground water source was shut off in the early 1980's. Tunnel residents are now forced to walk miles below and above ground to obtain water and food. Meals are cooked over fires that also serve to combat the damp chill. Residents recycle the discarded furniture and cookware of nearby apartment dwellers to create their own homes.

Among the tunnel residents was John, who wandered in, searching for a safe place to sleep after being attacked on a park bench.

So I kept walking to the back and found this house and started to clean it and fix it up. They were there for the workers.... I had to walk around the street at night to look for things that I wanted to put into it. And sometimes I had to carry it ten to fifteen blocks just to get it down.

John stayed for over twenty years, taking into his care fifteen abandoned cats and three stray dogs.

Bernard entered the tunnel in 1985. He supports himself by collecting cans in the early morning hours for redemption at a recycling center. Known as "The Lord of the Tunnel," Bernard became the spokesperson for the tunnel residents when they were threatened with eviction in 1991.

I have no regrets.... This existence has done so much for me. It's taken me from the vanity.... People think it's about laying back and being shiftless out here and it's not. A day-to-day existence can be most intense.
— Bernard

Cathy came to the tunnel in 1986 to join Joe, a Vietnam veteran she had met in Riverside Park. Disabled with asthma and epilepsy, Cathy had left her job in a law firm after her husband had died and her child had been killed. Although Joe had moved into one of the concrete rooms of the tunnel in 1973, it was not until Cathy arrived that he painted, added a door, and salvaged furniture. Cathy found pillows and blankets along the streets.

All the people "upstairs" have to do is get up out of their warm bed and walk into the kitchen and make what they need. We got to get up and go in front of a fire; make sure you have your paper and your this and your that or you don't eat. There's no delivery trucks coming down here with wood and supplies. The garbage cans is where we find our stuff.
— Cathy

Cathy adopted eighteen stray cats and a dog named "Buddy."

I'm not going to bring a child into this. It's hard for me and Joe to manage now. We're gonna take care of a baby? What if I have a baby? They're gonna put me in a shelter. I'm not going to live in one of those places. That's why we're down here. I got my little family, and that's enough. If you're feeling bad, they make you feel better. They're not like people, they're not two-faced. So that why I love my animals.
— Cathy

Reviews for The Tunnel

Other books: Fragile Dwelling, Transitory Gardens

Publication of The Tunnel was partially supported by the New York Foundation on the Arts. Margaret Morton's ongoing project has been partially supported by grants from the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Transitory Gardens,
Uprooted Lives
Diana Balmori and Margaret Morton

[Yale University Press, fall 1993]
116 pages, 115 photographs

When I first visited the homeless communities under the bridges and in the vacant lots of New York City, I was surprised to discover the gardens that these men and women build with such care and unique beauty to embellish and protect their improvised dwellings.

James Spence picked through the rubble of a crumbling building that overlooks an abandoned lot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, carefully selecting fragments to border the barren earth he had hollowed into an oval pond. Spence lined the pond with black plastic trash bags, creating an illusion of depth far beyond its six inches, and filled it with water from a nearby fire hydrant.

He found a discarded chair along the street — one leg was missing, so he sawed off the other three and joined it to a wooden palette at the head of the pond. In the back of the lot, Spence had clustered a sleeping tent, a collection of garden tools, and a vegetable garden planted with corn and tomatoes.

He sinks back into the red velveteen upholstered arm-chair, crosses his legs, lights a cigarette, and fondly recollects the pond as a child in South Carolina.

Spence, like many homeless people, evokes memories of his past through the creation of a garden.

Hector Amezquita, known as "Guineo" for his love of bananas, came to New York as a young man, but became homeless in the 1980s after he lost his job and his marriage ended. He built himself a one-room shack on a vacant lot off East Fourth Street following his eviction from Tompkins Square Park in 1989. In 1991, he added a walled entrance courtyard, reminiscent of his boyhood home in rural Puerto Rico.

The first time I start like a poor person. Now I feel better. Now I feel comfortable. Nobody bother me. I have to do it, because I'm an old man already. I'm on to fifty-five. Too much for me. For me, it's like a hundred.
— Hector

The interior courtyard provided a semi-private space for reading and visiting with friends. Amezquita created a path through the courtyard using bricks scavenged from a nearby building renovation, then added an inflatable palm tree and broken statue of a seated child.

I carry all these things here myself -- from the street, from everywhere, found them on Eighth Avenue, First Avenue, every piece of wood, I found it. Everything I found, I take it. Little by little, everything. I carried it all for more than two years.
— Hector

Perhaps by salvaging these discarded fragments, Spence, Amezquita, and others are also gathering the strength to survive. And as they reassemble these damaged bits of brick, plant and wood into a sense of place they are reaffirming our common and profound need to bring beauty and harmony into our existence, no matter how tenuous and impoverished the circumstances..

The gardens pictured here have been destroyed. All gardens disappear with the seasons, but these were uprooted by city bulldozers, never to return in Spring. Diana Balmori states in our book Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives, that "all gardens are transitory, like our lives. Yet in many respects they speak of a desire for permanence or at least an illusion of permanence. These urban gardens, pared of the superfluous, made with true economy of means by persons who are deprived of the most basic necessities, seem to point to the power of the garden. Few better examples of hope and the wish for fulfillment can be found."

Diana Balmori holds an appointment as a critic in landscape, Yale University School of Architecture, and as a lecturer in the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She is also principal at Balmori Associates, Inc., New Haven, a landscape and urban design firm.

Margaret Morton, a photographer who lives in New York City, is professor of art at The Cooper Union School of Art. Her photographs of the dwellings that homeless people have created for themselves are published in her books The Tunnel and Fragile Dwelling.

Margaret Morton 1998

The makeshift dwellings that the dispossessed of New York City improvise go far beyond the need for mere shelter. These structures, assembled from scavenged materials, give evidence of the profound human need to create a sense of place, no matter how extreme the circumstances. Clusters of dwellings frequently evolve into small villages, underscoring the need for community as well as privacy.

My project began in 1989, when over 150 homeless people resided in Tompkins Square Park on New York City's Lower East Side. Observing the care with which people built, furnished and decorated their temporary abodes, I realized that an important aspect of homelessness--the housing and a record of it--would be permanently lost when the buildings were inevitably demolished.

After the park was cleared by city policemen, I continued to photograph homeless builders and their habitats in vacant lots, public parks, along rivers, under bridges and highway exit ramps and in subterranean tunnels. One dwelling endured beneath the streets for twenty-six years; another existed along a sidewalk for a few hours.

This ongoing project records, through photographs and oral histories, these fragile communities as they undergo cycles of demolition, relocation and reconstruction that symbolize not only their builders' struggle for survival, but their desire for a place to call home.

The River People, the community depicted in this catalogue and exhibition, represents one of the earliest homeless encampments to evolve and one of the last to be destroyed.

Project Statement

In the late 1980s, a group of homeless men assembled a row of plywood shanties along the seawall that borders the East River between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Several of the individuals had been evicted from Tompkins Square Park. Others were expelled from vacant lots, public parks or abandoned buildings. Two of the men had fled the arched ramparts of the Brooklyn Bridge; another was routed from an underground tunnel. Some sought respite from the city's shelter system, while others sought refuge from foreign regimes. Few of the men were new to homelessness.

The sunrise offered solace. The sense of community offered stability. Wooden pallets, discarded from local delivery trucks, provided fuel and building supplies. Residents of neighboring projects discarded an endless supply of cans that the men redeemed for a nickel apiece. As the years passed, the makeshift dwellings were transformed into more permanent structures that evoked memories of childhood homes: a roof of equal pitch, the same front door, a rope porch railing, a nameplate over the entrance, a certain weather vane. The population grew to thirty-five. Girlfriends arrived. Stray pets were adopted.

From high above, the FDR Drive cast a mammoth shadow over the small village. Perhaps it was the incessant roar of cars that deafened the more subtle sound of the river's changing current. Few were prepared when the bulldozers came on July 1, 1996. For those who considered this home, the dream was shattered. Everyone moved on.

Questions for discussion:
• Why did you choose this Photographer?
• Does this photographer’s style work with what you are trying to do?

I chose this photographer- Margaret Morton- as a profound documentary photographer.
Which is what I aim to be. Her style is raw, with a lot of light and shadows.
I enjoy the subject matter. desolate, real, and the books that she has done are important.

I look at the critique of her own work, and books, and interviews, writings in her books, and then get discussion with friends who have appeared, or know someone in the books, and it is interesting to see peoples feelings regarding such, as well as what important parts Margaret Morton has left out, perhaps because of her own ununderstanding of 'that other world' or not fully grasping the story of her subjectmatter.

And this is where documentary jurnalism, or even photography of this kind, concerns me. I realize that we are all observers. We take from a reading or viewing, or experience what we can, be it innate 'been there' feeling, or perhaps alltogether newness of the viewer.

interesting musings. very real.

critique and contrast between a photo- style of my own and of a master photographer, (someone I admire)..
mine is on the right.

more photos to choose from...ah.

this is part of my assignment as well..

Questions for discussion:
• Why did you choose this Photographer?
• Does this photographer’s style work with what you are trying to do?

	Fragile Dwelling: Homeless Communities of New York City Margaret Morton [Aperture, fall 2000] 128 pages, 90 photographs Full description Order Fragile Dwelling A portion of the proceeds from the book, Fragile Dwelling, will benefit Coalition for the Homeless, New York.	Fragile Dwelling Aperture, 2000
	The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless Communities of New York City Margaret Morton [Yale University Press, fall 1995] 160 pages, 60 photographs Full description Order The Tunnel	The Tunnel Yale University Press, 1995
	Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives Diana Balmori and Margaret Morton [Yale University Press, fall 1993] 116 pages, 115 photographs Full description Order Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives	Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives Yale University Press, 1993

Margaret Morton has photographed the dwellings that homeless people in New York City create for themselves since 1989. Her project has taken her to public parks, city-owned vacant lots, along the waterfront and into underground tunnels. Photographs and oral histories from her ongoing project have been published in three books: Fragile Dwelling: Homeless Communities of New York City [Aperture, fall 2000]; The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City [Yale University Press, fall 1995; Schirmer/Mosel, Germany, 1996]; and Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives [co-authored with Diana Balmori, Yale University Press, fall 1993].

Morton’s exhibitions and books have been published and reviewed in Aperture, Art Forum International, Art in America, The Atlantic Monthly, DoubleTake, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, Village Voice, The Washington Post, as well as such international publications as The Times, The Guardian, The Independent/Sunday Review, Evening Standard, and Time Out [London]; Die Zeit and Der Spiegel [Germany]; and Asahi [Tokyo]. Her project is featured in the PBS documentary: Jacob Riis…Revisited [Pacific Street Films].

Morton's project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Graham Foundation.

Photographs from the project have been exhibited throughout the United States, including the The Museum of the City of New York, New Museum for Contemporary Art [New York], the National Building Museum [Washington DC], Cranbrook Art Museum [Michigan], and the Wexner Center for the Arts [Columbus]. The project also has been exhibited in Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Korea. Morton’s photographs are in the collections of the New York Public Library and Museum of the City of New York.

Morton, who received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art, is a professor of art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her photographs are represented by Margaret Bodell Gallery, New York City.

Margaret Morton's black-and-white photographs of environments that were created by the homeless people of New York City are all about making something from nothing. Morton's respect for the ingenuity of the men and women who built these shelters is clear. The photographs capture their architectural resourcefulness, and Morton's work neither romanticizes nor sentimentalizes; it simply honors what she found: the need to have a place of one's own. As we see in her pictures, rubble and discarded wood can be as powerful as marble.
—The New Yorker

"Where have all the homeless gone?," query European visitors, curious about the encampments that were highly visible earlier in the decade.

Riot police and bulldozers demolished the last Manhattan homeless community in 1997. Since then, the numbers of homeless poor have not diminished, but they have become less visible. An all night journey throughout the city finds urban nomads forever on the move: riding subways throughout the night; sleeping on dark, silent streets, hiding in the shadows of construction sites; tucking themselves into decaying structures along the waterfront; disappearing before dawn.

Ironically, the city’s building boom, which leveled homeless communities and community gardens, has provided temporary shelter for men and women who camp beneath construction scaffolding. Water is obtained from fire hydrants; a glass jar suffices as a toilet. Makeshift bedding is concealed moments before morning construction crews arrive.

Building entrances and church steps still provide protection for the dispossessed, but only after office hours or before Sunday worship.

Even the waterfront is navigated in time instead of space; safe haven ends at daybreak. Only early morning joggers, dog walkers, and park employees see homeless men and women bending over water fountains to brush their teeth, shaking dirt from sleeping bags, bundling possessions into backpacks, and moving on.

September 30, 2000

The ESSAY page will periodically feature current issues surrounding New York City’s homeless people.