It wasn't but a few times after seeing his face that he became etched in the mind of Michael O'Brien. The year was 1975 and O'Brien's job as photographer for the Miami News was to circle the city in a company car with a police radio until he found a story to snap. While on his work errands he became curious about a homeless man who held the ground beneath a freeway overpass. "Grizzled and burnt by the searing South Florida sun, the grit was baked deep into his skin. He had dark plaintive eyes that caught mine," the photographer writes. Although O'Brien wanted to look away, he soon befriended the man, John Madden, and began photographing him for the paper.
Those pictures and encounters form a preface to Hard Ground (University of Texas Press), a coffee table collection of black and white photos by O'Brien accompanied by the lonesome poetry of one of America's great recording artists, a man familiar with outsiders, Tom Waits. The poems sound a note in the lower registers of mystery, suggesting we can never entirely know the circumstances of O'Brien's homeless subjects but that we can begin to understand. Human sympathy is not the same as clinical analysis.
At the time O'Brien began photographing Madden and his friends, the homeless resembled the bums of old Hollywood. They were generally white men in their forties and fifties perennially pickled on cheap wine and booze. In the years after O'Brien became a highly paid photographer for Life and National Geographic, but as his career and the media changed from low-cost cutbacks at struggling magazines competing with no-cost new media, he began to revisit the haunts of the men he photographed in the '70s. They were gone but many new bodies had replaced them. In the new century, "The Face of homelessness has changed," he writes. When O'Brien began gathering the black and white Polaroid portraits that would fill the bulk of Hard Ground, he found women as well as men of all ethnic backgrounds and even entire families seeking shelter.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
O'Brien doesn't explain the changes but shows them in stark relief as Waits provides counterpoint in resonant words. The sadness that suffuses Hard Ground is only strengthened by O'Brien's uncertain situation. Although he maintains his middle class status, paying work is harder to find and Polaroid went bankrupt, bringing his project, and an important era in American visual art and documentation, to an end.
