New photography book features Tampa Bay’s homeless

The street portraits of Renato Rampolla

There’s nothing romantic about hardship. Whether it’s addiction, past traumas, loss of a job, divorce, or failing health. Adversity isn’t beautiful — it’s just hard. But, with his new photography book, Renato Rampolla shows us that people facing adversity, unlike adversity itself, can be beautiful. They are worth connecting and having meaningful conversations with.

While working on Dignity No Matter What, Rampolla spoke with homeless people in the Tampa Bay area, Boston, New Orleans, Savannah, and New York City. He learned their names. He conversed with them. He took their portraits. Rampolla went out of his way to show his subjects the basic love and respect that every human being deserves, but so many of us don’t get. 

It’s a theme that runs throughout the book, reinforced by a poignant selection of quotes, poetry, and original text. But the real story is told by the images themselves. With a couple of exceptions, all the portraits Rampolla selected for Dignity No Matter What are headshots. Looking at these images, we see eyes, noses, mouths. Facial features we all have. By blacking out or blurring his backgrounds, Rampolla forces us to focus on our shared humanity instead of our differences. We don’t see a homeless man. We see a man. 

At first I didn’t get it. I simply enjoyed the soulful black-and-white portraits, admiring Rampolla’s ability to capture so many pleasing shades of gray. When Rampolla does use color, it’s in a very muted way. Only in my dreams could I take portraits this beautiful. Once I overcame being dazzled by his technique, I started to notice the pattern — faces only.

“I like to focus on their humanity and not their circumstance,” says Rampolla. “You see the people on the street and you see the shopping carts — you see that all the time, but what you don’t see are the grains and the pores of their skin really up close, and every line. And look into their eyes, and try to get eye contact, and that’s what you really don’t see. You don’t see the humanity.”

Renato Rampolla is far from being the first person to take photographs of the homeless. “It’s a fairly common pursuit,” said photographer Robert Shultz in a 2017 interview with Photo District News. “People would decide to take up photography as a serious endeavor, and somewhere in that early stage they would imagine themselves digging deep into the human condition to reveal some truth that, perhaps in their naiveté, they don’t realize we already understand. And I think in a lot of cases, the homeless seem like an easy target. They’re omnipresent, and they can’t really not offer consent.”

It’s perfectly legal to take photographs of people out in public without asking them. Shultz, who was homeless himself for a few months in 2001, notes that homeless people are forced to be in public all the time. They have no private home to retreat to and escape unwanted attention — this includes unwanted attention from photographers. That’s not to say that the homeless, as a whole, object to being photographed. It’s just that they, like every person ever, would like to have some privacy at times. 

Rampolla, thankfully, asked his homeless subjects for permission to photograph them even though this is not required. Rampolla isn’t making any money off these photographs, either — net proceeds are going to local homeless charities. 

The only question remaining, then, is whether or not Rampolla’s project provides a unique enough take on a common subject to be worth your time.

If you Google “photography books homeless” there is a seemingly endless supply of hits. Up at the top, you’ll find links to Leah Denbok’s Nowhere to Call Home: Photographs and Stories of the Homeless (2017); Lynn Blodgett’s Finding Grace: The Face of America’s Homeless (2007); Teun Voeten’s Tunnel People (2010); Casey Coates Danson’s upcoming Angels Unawares: Portraits of the Homeless in L.A (January 24, 2019); Margaret Morton’s Fragile Dwelling (2000); Howard Schatz’s Homeless (1993); Ricky Molnar’s Homeless of Houston (2018); and David Weinberg’s Homeless: Portraits and Stories (2009), among others. There are a lot of photography books out there, and a lot of them are full of headshots. So why do we need another book of photographs of homeless people? 

Because there are still people without a home in the Tampa Bay area and beyond, and there are still people judging them for it. “To think that one human being is better because one lives with a roof over their head and the other one doesn’t — it’s preposterous,” says Rampolla.

In an ideal world, everyone who wanted a home would have one. Barring that, we should at least be able to treat them with kindness and compassion. You know there’s room for improvement when people living on the street tell Rampolla that folks won’t look them in the eye or that most people treat them like a prop. 

I asked Rampolla why he thinks we, as a society, treat our homeless this way. 

“People are wrapped up in their own lives, for one thing. There’s a sort of apathy. And then a lot of people for the same reason I did — basically thinking that these people should be able to help themselves. But it’s more complicated than that… There are so many things that could happen — loss of a loved one, addiction, mental health…” 

Sometimes all it takes is one thing to tip the scales into homelessness, like the loss of a job. Most people in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck. Our lives, as we live them, are far more precarious than we realize. 

Now when Rampolla looks at the homeless, he realizes “it could be any of us.

“What I’m trying to do is just change the mental outlook about [homelessness] — to change the social consciousness from ‘these people are lazy, indigent, good-for-nothing people, and they deserve what they get’ to ‘hey these people are in a temporary situation and they deserve a little bit of respect,’” says Rampolla, “That is my humble aspiration — just for people to think about them as our fellow human beings rather than lepers.

“No matter who you are, you deserve to be treated in a dignified matter.”

Dignity No Matter What: The Light Within

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This article appears in Dec 27, 2018 – Jan 3, 2019.