Focusing on Milwaukee’s Inner City

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Photo courtesy of Tom Jenz

Photographer Tom Jenz

Since 2014, Tom Jenz dedicated himself to walking the streets of inner-city Milwaukee, making use of his experience in television and photography to record what he calls the “third-world reality” of life for many Milwaukeeans. He compiled much of his work on tomjenzamerica.com, and shares his insight with Off the Cuff.

Why did you choose to focus your work on the inner-city?

I spent 25 years traveling around the West and Midwest, seeing small towns and rural America, because I was interested in what they call “Vanishing America.” It means people whose lives and cultures won't be around in another generation, like farmers, family owned barber shops... I spent a lot of time just driving around, talking to people and taking pictures of things that are gone, now. I have probably 250 pictures of small-town post offices, small-town cafés, downtowns, people, etc.

I lived in Madison and used to travel to Milwaukee. I was thinking, “Vanishing America has vanished”; let's face it, it has become much more homogenized. There isn’t much of a subject matter left, there. But then, I got to thinking about Milwaukee, and I thought, “What would it be like to investigate the neglected inner-city?” I mean [zip codes] 53206 and 53205. I read a lot about it; it’s a very dangerous area, but I thought, “What if I just tried walking the streets all day with my camera to see what happens?” I tried doing just that, walking around, and I tried to engage people I met on the streets and in the stores. I was the only white man I’ve ever seen in six years walking the streets, besides service people. That's how segregated and isolated that whole area is.

What did you discover there?

First, you need to know that, in the inner-city, there are no homeless; the homeless will not go there, it’s too dangerous. In these former manufacturing cities, like Milwaukee, the manufacturing jobs went away quickly, and there was nothing to replace them. Successful black people who lived in the inner-city in the 1960s had very good factory jobs working for the beer companies around here, but they lost their jobs. These neighborhoods used to be integrated, but white people moved out—they call it “white flight”—and all the middle-class black people moved, too, leaving only the people with difficulties fending for themselves. What's left is a welfare culture, as the government started offering public housing and food stamps to help these people out. We know what happened there; that didn’t work out at all.

While walking through the inner-city, I wasn’t trying to determine what's wrong or what's right—I was just trying to observe what is. To me, anger is depression turned inward; if you’re a young black man with pride and you lose that, you get depressed and very angry. You turn to the gangs, and you feel like you belong, now. You feel like you have a community and a purpose. The two major crimes in the area are drug dealing and car stealing. The gangs will recruit boys to steal cars in the suburbs because the boys are juveniles and are put back on the streets when they’re caught. It’s very difficult to arrest drug dealers because the police need to catch them actually in the act, the police need to see the drugs; if the dealers get caught, they often get bailed out. It’s almost like a revolving door, we can't stop it.

But the real tragedy is that 95% of the people living in the inner-city don’t want crime there, but we don’t seem to be doing much about it. There are no businesses or jobs, the streets are all cracked and pockmarked, the alleys are dirty, there are no public bathrooms—I have to pee in alley next to another guy peeing in an alley. I'd like to see this whole situation exposed in the media, to see what is really going on there. If you live in the suburbs, you think, “This is a horrible area, I’ll never go near there.” It divides people. Throwing a bunch of money at the problem won’t make it go away.

Your photographs show a hopeful and positive side to the inner-city; can you talk to us about the people you met there?

If I photograph a person, I never ask them to do anything. I want them to do what they would normally do. I like to do environmental portraits, which means to give a sense of where the person is. That's my style: documentary photography. I always have a narrative for every person or place I photograph, I tell the story of what I observed.

I once met a guy named Patrick in the largest abandoned school in Milwaukee. I was looking to take pictures of the building, and a big, African American guy was standing there. He said, “I’m scrapping.” That means he was taking metal fixtures, like vents or desks, anything that's metal, and he’d put them in his truck to sell. It’s illegal, you can't just break into a school, but he had been doing that for quite a while. He said, “I'm trying to get out of this area. I’m married with a child, and my dream is to get out of this neighborhood and have my child go to school in the suburbs.” That's one way of earning a living. Another example is a woman named Roz, who has a hair salon on 27th, in a very dangerous area. Hair salons are one of the few businesses left that can still do well. I admire her for running a business in these conditions.

Many people try to help. One of the most impressive organizations I’ve been involved with are the Fatherhood Initiative: They try to reunite the actual fathers with their children, they have a training program where they help the fathers learn how to be responsible, how to get a job, how to interview, etc. There have been successes, and it helps them regain a sense of community.

One thing that comes to mind is an old, abandoned liquor store. One Saturday, there was a small gospel group on the parking lot, with microphones and amplifiers, and that black woman was singing and talking. I take some photos, and a man comes up to me, and he says, “I’m the pastor of this church.” What church? He replies, “We’ve turned this liquor store into a church. This is our Saturday afternoon gathering, with food and testimonials.” They’re trying to find a way to create some community, so the children don’t get involved in crime. That storefront church in the inner-city, that feels hopeful to me. They're trying to make sense of all that.

What is the message you think everyone should hear about the inner-city?

It is easy to think of it as a dangerous place, but the people there have real values and culture. People in the inner-city are boisterous, they have a wonderful sense of humor; hip-hop and rap culture is very prominent there; the way they drive cars is very different; the old people dress up in old-fashioned clothes like it’s the 1930s, they are always dressed to the nines when they go to church.

I believe that we’re all tribal, that’s genetic. I believe that we separate each other in socioeconomic groups, and we probably always will. I believe that, to an extent, we group up by skin color. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to understand each other’s point of view.

For more information, visit tomjenzamerica.com.

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz

Photo by Tom Jenz