JM Simpson’s day starts at 5 a.m. He typically picks up a bag of donuts and a few packs of cigarettes and grabs his camera. By 6:15, he’s on the streets of Olympia, Washington, introducing himself to homeless people. A photojournalist by trade, Simpson’s practice is to approach homeless people and talk to them for up to 30 minutes before asking to snap a picture. He’ll shoot two or three frames at most — never continuously shooting.
“I know that they’re in public, and I know they don’t have the expectation of privacy, but they do have the expectation of self-respect,” Simpson said. “These are not animals to be gawked at like they’re in the zoo.”
Simpson doesn’t have a website or social media. Currently residing in Washington state, Simpson is a retired community college teacher and photojournalist. He previously covered conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. His upbringing and exposure to conflict helped form a compass that guides him during these interactions.
“I’m privileged, I’m white, I’m male, and I grew up middle class, I’ve been in combat zones,” Simpson said. “I’ve been around the world. No one deserves to live without a house, without medical care, without food. Nobody sat me down, so to speak. It’s more like the compass was there. And one day, the compass, the point of the compass, poked me and said, ‘You’ve got a camera, Simpson, use it.’”
Simpson’s value of photographing homelessness comes from his belief that, in the future, some will deny the severity of the homelessness crisis in the United States. He sees it as his responsibility to document it.
“These are real human beings that are being ignored and left — in some senses, I think — left to die. Capture it. This is history,” said Simpson.
Street papers
Madi Koesler, a photojournalist with Street Sense Media, says she covers stories with a trauma-informed lens. As a photojournalist, her purpose is to “visualize bureaucratic processes that might be hard to picture.”
The First Amendment guarantees the right to photograph anything in public that can be seen from public property.
As journalists, Koesler says, we have strict rules and norms when it comes to quoting, which ought to be applied similarly to photographing. For example, Koesler says Street Sense allows people to be quoted without their full names in the interest of protecting their identity. Similarly, she takes photos without including faces or other defining characteristics.
Koesler developed her compass with assistance from her mentor, Greg Marinovich, at Boston University. Her photography style goes hand-in-hand with her ethics.
“I wouldn’t sneak into someone’s kitchen and photograph their stove then rush away before they came out of their bedroom — so why would I sneak around and photograph someone’s fire pit beside their tent while they’re asleep?” said Koesler.
Founded 13 years ago, the International Network of Street Papers helps start, sustain and build connections between street papers internationally. With over 90 street papers in 35 countries, those in the U.S. tackle homelessness and poverty, driven by lived experience. Mike Findlay, CEO of INSP, says he hopes the world of street papers will have a cumulative effect on policy and media.
As an organization, INSP has a relationship with Reuters News and the Centre for Homelessness Impact that allows papers in the network to access banks of images created by homeless people as well as images created by professional photographers with the intention of displaying “authentic” images of homelessness.
“It’s about changing the narrative, to more accurate representation, having more authentic voices, and how they can set an example to a wider sense of media,” said Findlay.
The Homelessness Reporting Guide was created by the Homelessness Beat Reporters Collective and released earlier this year.
Robert Davis, a freelance journalist in Colorado, described how Lisa Halverstadt, a senior investigative reporter with the Voices of San Diego, got a group of reporters together in a Zoom meeting to discuss what it takes to report on stories about homelessness.
“So we decided to put our heads together and put together a guide,” said Davis.
The initial meetings surrounded who the group would talk to, which ended up being journalists and students, while future editions will speak more to editors and media company owners.
A large part of the group’s conversations involved how much they wanted to push against journalistic norms.
For example, Davis said, people experiencing homelessness are often suffering from sleep deprivation, dehydration or malnutrition. If he can get a sandwich and some water to the person he’s interviewing, he can often more accurately represent their thoughts and personality. It can be seen as contradicting the more traditional maxim often taught in journalism schools that it’s unethical to feed homeless sources.
The group also discussed ways to bridge the gap in homelessness reporting between larger media groups and street papers.
The draft guide that’s currently available is the first iteration of many, according to Davis.
“With this document, there is a standardization,” said Findlay.
Professionals say
Dan Morrison, photojournalist and professor of practice at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications, says he stresses to his students the importance of news value when covering homelessness.
“I tell my students, I do not ever let people do stories on homeless people unless there is a situation,” said Morrison.
He gave the example of encampment sweeps, arrests and Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Chris Pietsch started as a photographer at the Register Guard in Eugene in 1988. He would often “parachute in” to cover homelessness.
“I found it to be somewhat frustrating,” Pietsch said. “A lot of times there wasn’t an opportunity to build any relationship with the people involved.”
Pietsch’s promotion to director of photography in 2013 coincided with the SLEEPS movement in Eugene. Pietsch remembers going to various camps, waiting for someone to get arrested for trespassing and moving on to another camp.
“I just decided that there was enough going on there that I just turned it into a beat,” said Pietsch.
That beat gave Pietsch the opportunity to go back to sources, create relationships, recognize who would cooperate and who had the liberty of speaking to the media. He found this beat more satisfying and fulfilling and was also able to follow solutions to problems.
“I felt like I was making better photographs, but I was also able to kind of feel like I wasn’t burning bridges,” said Pietsch.
Photojournalist and writer for the Denver Voice Giles Clasen said when he graduated journalism school in 2003, the only rule for publishing a photo was to get the subject’s name.
In Clasen’s experience, folks on the street generally say yes when asked to be photographed. And if someone says no, “unfortunately, there’s enough homeless people out there that somebody else will say yes, and you’ve got your image for the story,” Clasen said.
Clasen said average journalists cover policy when their intention is to cover homelessness.“Policy can be good or bad,” Clasen said. “It can be well-intentioned, it can be harmful, but unless we’re getting interviews with people who have experienced homelessness, we’re not getting a voice on the actual day-to-day impact of any one policy.
Emily Fitzgerald, an assistant professor of art practice at Portland State University, says she doesn’t have a clear, step-by-step code of when photographing marginalized communities or potentially sensitive subject matter. Instead, she thinks about the primary and secondary audience — the audience the piece is created with in mind, and the audience that might tangentially encounter the piece.
For example, in a project titled Some Time Between Us, Fitzgerald brought together students from Beaumont Middle School with older adults from the Hollywood Senior Center to explore expression and identity. The installation took place at bus stops, so as to target both middle schoolers and older adults.
“The value in being an image maker is shifting the way you observe,” said Fitzgerald. “I’m less interested in the final product and more in the process, using images to understand. Maybe they’re never fully produced.”
Historically, access to film was limited, Fitzgerald said. The development of iPhone cameras democratized photography.
Elizabeth Bowen, a researcher and associate professor at the University at Buffalo, conducted a study called Faceless, nameless, invisible: a visual content analysis of photographs in U.S. media coverage about homelessness. Bowen and then-PhD candidate, Nicole Capozziello, analyzed over 200 images. Many images lacked eye contact and names in captions, they found. More photos featured tents and shopping carts than affordable housing.
Bowen noted the differences between these depictions and the ways politicians and volunteers in the same situations are photographed in a more humanizing way.
With the rates and presence of homelessness increasing, people experiencing homelessness become fixtures of culture. Reducing homeless people to their belongings or not featuring them at all runs the risk of reducing homeless people to the landscape of a city, not a human with a right to exist.
“Just because this is what we found doesn’t mean it has to stay that way,” said Bowen.
Editor’s note: Street Roots newspaper is a member of the International Network of Street Papers
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This article appears in July 30, 2025.
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