Home sweet home

More Autum and the Arches

God loves

Friday Fotos: Graffiti and the Homeless at an Abandoned Building in Jersey City

Homes by the Homeless (& the Power of Pictures)

When I first spotted the site in the above photo it was by accident. I was walking under the 14th Street viaduct and noticed some furniture and stacked boxes. 'That's odd,' I thought. 'I wonder how THAT got there.' I walked rapidly toward the site and before I knew it I was standing amid this furniture and these belongings. Someone obviously lived here and I was in their home, in the middle of the day, without their knowledge and without their permission. Part of me was embarrassed and wanted to get out of there, pronto! but another part was fascinated and just had to take photos, even though I didn't have permission to do so. So I took the photos. It was a very strange situation to be in.

Does Bhutan's Proclaimed Happiness Rest on an Act of National Cruelty?

Viduyapati Mishra writes in the NYTimes:

After tightening its citizenship laws in the mid-1980s, Bhutan conducted a special census in the south and then proceeded to cast out nearly 100,000 people — about one-sixth of its population, nearly all of them of Nepalese origin, including my family. It declared us illegal immigrants, even though many of us went back several generations in Bhutan. It hasn’t let any of us move back.

The enormity of this exodus, one of the world’s largest by proportion, given the country’s small population, has been overlooked by an international community that is either indifferent or beguiled by the government-sponsored images of Bhutan as a serene Buddhist Shangri-La, an image advanced by the policy of “gross national happiness,” coined by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in the 1970s.

Home Sweet Home

The sleeping area:

Transportation:

Let the Sunshine in

Things Change, Shit Happens, Environmental Art

There's always paint on the wall, and there's always someone's bed at the foot of the wall.

6 Nov 2007

1 December 2007

A View to Paradise

Tools of Civilization

I took these photos in the same place, but at different times. Early in the 20th Century a trolley line went through this place, which is in Jersey City, in a place known locally as the Bergen Arches (this is under one of the arches). I don't know when the trolley line was abandoned, but this space is now given over to homeless people and graffiti writers.