Sunday, December 21, 2008
While the war on poverty has been waged by liberals since the 1960s, the pictures below are actual homes that people live in here in the State of Maine. I took these pictures a few years ago when I traveled to Ripley, Maine to do some photography for Doug Thomas and his firewood operation. After a day of work with Doug, we took off to take some photos of poverty in Maine.
I remember getting lunch at a store that was closing due to lack of business. We talked with a young teenager who was working all kinds of odd jobs to get out of rural Maine. When asked why she did not want to stay she basically said the only options for young people in rural Maine were drugs or welfare. Sadly three years later little has changed.
Loggers don't cut wood. Paper Companies don't make paper and textile mills don't make fabrics for the clothes that people wear. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to live in one of these homes. Especially given the weather we are getting with temps in the single digits.
Here is to being thankful for what we have.
Tony
PS. You can see my work with Doug Thomas here.
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3 comments:
very well said !
I grew up in a trailer not unlike the houses you show. The kids I went to school with lived in worse places than that. The poor in Maine don't want pity or improvement from the concerned outside enterprises. They want jobs to feed their families and the freedom to live in whatever kind of structures they want to call home.
You want real Maine, read Carolyn Chute. The places and personalities are more real than someone from Westbrook will ever know.
Although I am not as financially impoverished now as I was in my childhood, I can tell you with some authority that the people who live in those houses you photograph resent like hell being held up as some museum exhibit of poverty to be examined and tutt-tutted over. Just because they have no money does not mean they have no feelings and can be objectified as a sociological study without consequence.
Just sayin'.
The poverty is real. I have two sons in Maine, both have been layed off from good jobs and one actually will be homeless in less than two weeks.
Maine is expensive to live in of all states we have been to.
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