One For the Senses: Street Health Stories

By Lianna Shen

It’s happened to all of us before. You’re walking on the street and suddenly you smell garbage. It’s that sour, pungent odour that reminds you that you are, indeed, living in a metropolitan city. You look to your left for the culprit; usually an overstuffed garbage receptacle filled with remnants of wasteful urban life.

But on this day there is no receptacle. Confused, you look behind you to see where this stench could possibly be coming from. Sure enough, you’ve been mistaken. Coming up behind you is a lady, garbage bag slung over the shoulder, holes in her shoes, hair not brushed, and face unwashed.

The smell is she. And as much as you want to deny the urge to hold your breath, your bodily instinct is to do so, or at the very least, your face slightly grimaces from her smell. As she walks past you muttering, your heart sinks and you feel like a bad person - because you have just mistaken the scent of a living, breathing human being for a pile of garbage.

The homeless people of Toronto are an undeniable part of the downtown street culture. But as urbanites go about their busy days, occasionally dropping a coin into the cup of a panhandler, these people are living lives too.

Street Health Stories, a photo and sound installation at the Holy Trinity Church in downtown Toronto, gives a voice and portrait to these stories. Four photographers, who have experienced homelessness, capture the stories of eight individuals who live on the streets. In life-sized headshot portraits accompanied with audio recordings, these men and women – Nancy, Phil, Heather, Ola, Rook, Susan, and Joe – tell their side of the street story.

These faces don’t look very “homeless”. If homelessness is characterized by the unclean and unshaven, they definitely don’t represent that. Phil sports some sharp cut-lines in his facial hair that can only be obtained by a hand-held razor – and most likely done so quite close in time before the photo was taken. Ola, who is now deceased, looks almost trendy with a natural-looking Afro. But look a bit closely – and you see the belt Joe’s wearing that’s been belted for about five years longer than its manufacturer conceived it for, and the stain on Susan’s cream sweater that by now has probably fused as one with the cheap synthetic fibres.

You put on a comfy, cushy pair of headphones and push play on an embedded Ipod to hear their voices. It’s an uncanny feeling, as the excess of the expensive technology through which the stories are delivered juxtaposes the tragedies that the words expel. The cost of the installation could probably feed the entire subject group for more than a month. But this is real life, told through art. So let’s make an exception.

As I am going from Rook to Susan, slipping off one pair of headphones in exchange for another, a man interrupts me.

I am the only one at the exhibit right now, and this man has been watching me for a while, from the blue leather couch behind me. He is homeless, he tells me. And since I am taking the time to listen to these people’s stories, he wants to tell me something too.

Homelessness has its own subculture, he says. Just like any other subculture, it thrives when there are people, and there are people in the subculture that count on it as a way of life. He tells me things that he thinks I don’t know. That the money I give to people on streets is not used for food, but for crack. That I should offer to buy a meal for a street person one day and see how fast they say no.

His eyes are shifting, as if he’s searching my face for a hidden mole. The same slur marks his speech that many of the installation subjects have – an impediment that sounds as if the tongue has been frozen by too many winter nights on the streets or that the muscles in the mouth and face have lost function to roll certain consonants. But nevertheless, his delivery is grammatically accurate, and I have almost nothing to say in response, except – thank you.

Why did I thank him, instead of asking for more of his story? Well, a part of me was getting a bit uneasy. As he spoke to me he was inching closer to me, and I couldn’t help but think that he was high on something. And being alone with him in that church at the moment was not very comforting. And in case you are wondering, he did smell homeless.

After listening to Susan’s story, and then to Joe’s, I leave through the backdoor of the church, waving goodbye to the man who is now back to napping on the couch. It is noon and the sun is high and bright; I encourage him to get out and enjoy the good weather.