Research Activity. Images of Homelessness.
1) Type the word ‘homeless’ in a search engine and look at the pictures that appear in response to the search.
2) Look at the first 30 pictures and make a list, describing the situations of homelessness that they depict. Try to link those situations to the definitions of homelessness produced by FEANTSA. We have quoted and commented them in the Homelessness chapter but you can easily find them on the web as well.
3) Take some notes on the following question: What is your
explanation for the prevalence of certain type of picture?
While thinking
please try to also reflect on the following tentative explanations:
- Some situations of homelessness are more difficult to illustrate or capture with photos.;
- Some aspects of homelessness described by FEANTSA are actually rarely perceived as homelessness by journalists, photographs or the general public;
- There are many historically developed stereotypes about the homeless.
4) Try to repeat the search with a word for ‘homeless’ in at least one language other than English but preferably more. If you don’t happen to know such a word you can use an online dictionary or translation service. For your convenience here is one of the words used for homeless in Chinese (无家可归) and Hindi (बेघर).
5) Reflect on the following aspects of your second search:
- Do you see any differences in the head of the search list or does it look roughly the same as in English? Even if it looks roughly the same are there any additional aspects of homelessness appearing in the listed pictures.
- Here is one apparently formal feature of the photos to think about when you interpret the lists produced by pasting words for homeless in English or German compared with those in, let’s say, Hindi: How often do the pictures present individuals or small groups of persons as opposed to a larger number of persons? Do you think that photos featuring a larger number of persons typically represent different situations of homelessness compared to those featuring individuals?