Photo exhibit sheds light on hard living
By Mary Katherine Keown, The Sudbury Star
Living on the Outside tells the scary, sad story of homelessness.
Based on Carol Kauppi’s research into poverty and homelessness, the photos were taken in spots throughout Northern Ontario, and show just how difficult life on the streets can be.
“This exhibit shows images taken by people who are homeless or near homeless,” Kauppi, a social work professor at Laurentian University and the director of the Centre for Research in Social Justice and Policy, said Sunday. “We recruited people with lived experience of being on the street. Many of the people who were housed at the time were poorly housed in substandard forms of housing, and you can see that in the images – what it is that people were concerned about. The images also show where people slept outside, sometimes during the winter. I think that can be really startling for people who live here and maybe don’t realize that people actually sleep outside, even in the winter.”
People in Sudbury, Cochrane, Fort Albany First Nation and Constance Lake First Nation created the photographs in the exhibit.
Each photo tells its own story about how sleeping outside and in substandard housing affects mental health. The exhibit includes narratives about the impact of disordered housing on homeless and near homeless people. There is even a laptop set up with digital stories, each about five minutes long, relating what it is like to sleep rough or discussing an aspect of homelessness.
