STREET PORTRAITURE
The portraits of Diane Arbus, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia, Katy Grannan, and the Three Fs of working on the street
The woman leaning in the doorway didn’t ask for money. We just had a friendly conversation while I waited for an Uber. She told me that her name was Juana Maria Gomez Soto and that the doorstep we were standing on was where she slept at night. There don’t seem to be many homeless people in Guatemala City; the government has no patience with their existence, but she was old and, according to her, not a nuisance, so she was let be.
When I asked her what town she was from initially, and she told me, her eyes lit up. She had not thought of her childhood in a long time, and she remembered now how much she loved to dance when she was little. By the time she was 18 years old, she was doing it professionally with a troupe that traveled all over Central America. She did this for ten years until getting pregnant. Then, for 16 years, she worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family that provided a room in their home for her and her daughter.
This all came to an end when the wife of the master discovered that he was sleeping with the teenaged daughter. The girl and her mother were immediately locked out of the house with only the clothes they were wearing. They were not paid what they were…
