New Work: ‘Hard Ground’ by Michael O’Brien, Poems by Tom Waits
Two years ago we published Pentagram Papers 39, called SIGNS, which focused on the issue of homelessness in America. SIGNS featured a selection of hand-drawn homeless signs, photographed by Randal Ford, and gritty black and white portraits of homeless people by Michael O’Brien. The signs featured in Ford’s color photographs were from the personal collection of Texas music legend Joe Ely, who wrote the introduction to the book recounting his own experience of being homeless.
After the publication of SIGNS, O’Brien continued to work on his large format homeless portraits, which grew into a sizable body of work. O’Brien sent a selection of his photographs to the renowned singer-songwriter Tom Waits, described by the New York Times as “the poet of outcasts.” Waits, inspired by O’Brien’s powerful portraits, composed a series of poems, and the notion of a larger expanded volume was born. Hard Ground, published by The University of Texas Press, and designed by DJ Stout and Barrett Fry in Pentagram’s Austin office, features 78 of O’Brien’s portraits and 23 original poems by Waits. The combination creates a portrait of homelessness that impels us to look into the eyes of people who are down on their luck and recognize our common humanity. Hard Ground transcends documentary and presents independent yet powerfully complementary views of the trials of homelessness and the resilience of people who survive on the streets.
The internationally renowned photographer Mary Ellen Mark says this about Hard Ground: “If I can think of a book to relate to this one, it would be James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. That book was photographed in 1936—during the Great Depression—and published in 1941. It had an enormous influence—and still does—on the way photography and writing can work together as a catalyst for social change.”
In the introduction to the book, Michael O’Brien tells the story of how in 1975 he met a man named John Madden who lived under an overpass. O’Brien, who was a staff photographer for the Miami News at the time, began chronicling Madden’s daily life—at times even camping out with him under the bridge. The resulting documentary conveyed empathy for the homeless and disenfranchised and won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Now O’Brien has come full circle to a time when homelessness has grown exponentially since the 1970s, with as many as 3.5 million adults and children in America experiencing homelessness at some point in any given year.
At the SIGNS launch event held in Austin in 2009, Pentagram raised over $5,000 to benefit the local homeless charity Mobile Loaves & Fishes. Now Waits has followed suit by offering a limited edition preview of the poems featured in Hard Ground through his website and Anti- records. All proceeds will go to homeless charities.
