(DOWNLOAD) "Destitute Discourses: The Art of Orchestrating Fear and Fantasy in Photographs of Homeless People." by Arena Journal " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Destitute Discourses: The Art of Orchestrating Fear and Fantasy in Photographs of Homeless People.
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 216 KB
Description
During the late 1970s the streets of major cities in Western Europe, the United States, Great Britain and Australia swelled with new populations of homeless people. (1) Identified contributing factors included the effects of economic downturn and subsequent adjustments to fiscal policy in order to address balance-of-payment deficits, gentrification of low-cost housing, the withdrawal of funding from public housing and welfare programs, and increasing poverty due to rising unemployment. (2) The eruption of managerialism, neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the consequent further polarization between the poor and the wealthy, shifted the profile of the homeless subject. Youth and women with children were identified as the largest growing subsets amongst the new homeless. (3) In this climate of increasing social problems, retreating government responsibility for social welfare, and a return to 19th-century attitudes about poverty and its causes, there was a revival of the documentary zeal of the 1930s and 1940s. The emergent homeless population composed of sole mothers and 'street-kids', accommodated in squats and the cast-off cardboard containers of consumer goods, constituted inspiring subject matter for photographers, journalists, film-makers and artists. The resultant photographic images displayed variously in advertising, news media, welfare publicity, social documentary and the visual arts portray damaged, disaffected individuals. They are almost always presented as simultaneously victims and victimizers, dangerous to themselves and others, visibly scarred by the inability to succeed as productive citizens. Homeless youth, although often presented as threatening, are also composed as 'pathetic' creatures. This is not a new visual device: social activists have circulated representations of homeless women and children since the mid-1800s. As emotive images grounded in discourses which assert particular forms of desirable femininity and ideal childhood, they mobilize a range of moral and social responses and exercise persuasive power by inciting guilt and indignation.
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