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In the News
Artists Putting Homeless in Focus
Nov, 24 2010
Tom Waits will make his publishing debut with Hard Ground, a book of poetry about the homeless, this coming March. Waits’ words will be alongside photographs by award-winning photojournalist Michael O’Brien’s images of people who live on the ground.
Waits, whom the New York Times once called “the poet of outcasts,” teamed with O’Brien to communicate the common humanity of people who live on the streets, letting words and images "communicate on their own terms, rather than merely illustrate each other.” The book is modeled on the 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which combined James Agee's poetry and Walker Evans's photographs of Depression-era farmers.
Coldplay, too, is attempting to shine light on the plight of the homeless by performing two “surprise” Christmastime benefit shows, reported the U.K. Guardian earlier this month. Perhaps an inequitable comparison, Coldplay, by withholding the venues until the last minute, hopes to illuminate the difficulty and unpredictability the homeless face many times each day. According to the band, "gig-goers [will experience] a small taste of the uncertainty faced by the thousands of homeless people who do not know where they will spend the night."
