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.

this is what i am doing now for school. date sept 19th.
We will be looking at different photography masters. Choose one to discuss. What is it that makes their work so special? Look at the works of this artist relative to his/her historical, social and cultural sphere. Then look at your own work and tell us about your current social and cultural sphere and how this is reflected in your work.

Some suggestions: Minor White, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, Chris Jordan, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Lester Hayes, Ciro Totku, Nicholas Nixon, Alfred Stieglitz or choose anyone who has inspired you.

• What genre is the photographer considered to be working in?
• What is their style?
• What major event may have help to shape his/her work?
• How does the chosen photographer’s work fit into the time they were/are producing their work?
• Are/were they considered ahead of their time?
• Does/Will their work stand up to the test of time?


i chose:
margaret morton

publisher of many books and photo compositions..Margaret Morton has spent the past decade documenting the homeless of Manhattan and the ephemeral shelters they have built on dormant and appropriated real estate. Their presence constitutes a small but disproportionately jarring feature of the cityscape, yet within it she has found an unexpected abundance of beauty, serenity and invention. Morton has photographed on the upper west side of New York City and throughout the lower east side, where she has lived since 1986. Her personal engagement with her subjects involves exploration of character and history and is essential to her method. The philosophical narratives with which she is rewarded can be breathtakingly succinct and are juxtaposed with the photographs in her publications; these stories infuse and leaven the black depths shared by Morton's visual vocabulary and the actual sites and situations.

Morton received an undergraduate degree in art from Kent State University and completed graduate studies at Yale University. Studies in photography paved the way for the homeless work, while her concentration in design informs her organization and structure of the project's voluminous material. Morton's embrace of photography as a tool for social awareness and change relates to the tradition of photographer-reformers like Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, whose unflinching photographs of sweatshops and slums led to labor and housing reforms early in this century. Like them, she seeks to position her work in the public eye and in sociopolitical discourse and has exhibited, lectured and published widely. Since homelessness is not tied to geography, Morton's work has graced exhibitions and seminar agendas around the globe.

Morton is an Associate Professor of Art at Cooper Union and has taught at Yale and SUNY Purchase. Her work has been reviewed and published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The London Times and Die Zeit, in addition to numerous arts publications, including Aperture and Artforum. Two books have been published from her ongoing project, "The Architecture of Despair": Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives and The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City. Morton has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Graham Foundation, among others.

Ultimately, Morton's stringently unsentimental photographs and texts lay bare common denominators regarding physical need and spiritual longing. They also reveal the dignity inherent in human perseverance.

end quote.

New year, alot of changes and challenges. I feel as though this is where I needed to be,solid. Happiness will come when the panic of the new goes away and I can sit and think. More photos coming up.

final project for photo class

final digital photo project for class

Desperate for water, a young fool finds himself on a dark road to hell. With a lantern, (can I drink lamp oil-kerosene?) to guide his way he passes by fields and streams, yes streams, polluted by the wrath of man versus man. A story too long and terrible to explain.
And he is blearing images. And he is seeing water everywhere. And the lights and chemicals in his brain are blinking and shooting and all the neon is coming alive, until that neon shows him a house. A home. A sanctuary.
And the horse. The horse is alive.
Or can it be? What in god's good name would allow a creature to subsist on these chemical atrocities, of bludgeoned stench filled sewer-streams?

And who is the beast who lives inside this home?
RUN AWAY RUNAWAY- runaway runaway. And
he's dead.