-By Warner Todd Huston
As Americans find fewer jobs, as more homes are foreclosed upon, and as more people become desperate, perhaps some are living off the grid and escaping to the woods to live in makeshift houses? At least one photographer near Baltimore found just such a community and took some fascinating photographs of them.
While hiking through the forgotten sections of Baltimore, Maryland–areas behind Wal-Marts, near railroad tracks, and in small patches of woods–photographer Ben Marcin found an interesting series of makeshift homes and campsites hidden there.
Some were made of tents or sheets of plastic, others merely a bedroll on some wooden pallets, but others were more elaborate. One, for instance, was made up of dozens of plastic milk crates while another was fashioned from discarded wooden doors.
The photos are of a series of stark, spare living spaces, remote, and rough but with the sort of quirky character befitting of folks who are castoffs from society.
Marcin said he took the images of these makeshift homesteads without the owners in the image to “leave a bit of the mystery out there for viewers to ponder.”
In an interview with The Atlantic, Marcin said that he first found the many camps when he came across one by accident. He then began to hunt such places out to document them with his camera lens.
“I have always been interested in the unique places people live in,” Marcin said, “particularly where there exists an element of defiance or desperation, or both. In these situations, a house can often reflect the dilemma of its owner. In the case of the hobo camps, this reflection is quite pronounced for obvious reasons. A sheet of plastic laid out over a clothesline may be the last stand for somebody who has either been rejected by society or who has refused to conform to whatever rules are being imposed on them. Several camp people I talked to said they wouldn’t relocate into one of the City’s shelters because they were afraid of being assaulted or having belongings stolen.”
Marcin also noted that a year later he went back to find some of the same camps he encountered before but found they were all gone. Some razed by government officials, others just abandoned. Campers apparently just moved to new places likely not to stay long there either.
The photos are interesting and the whole thing gives rise to a specter of shantyvilles that brought embarrassment and disaster to another president decades ago.
Back in the 1920s, President Herbert Hoover was beset by shanty towns that arose as a result of The Great Depression. There were so many and they were so indicative of Hoover’s failure to lead the nation out of depression that they became known as Hoovervilles becoming a glaring symbol of government failure.
Photographer Marcin’s Obamacare cities in Baltimore are likely just the tip of the iceberg.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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