For a few days, I traveled through SF, San Francisco for friends, beautiful Frisco, the flagship of California, the richest state in the United States.
What I saw there, me, had nothing of Golden, nor Glamor. This is perhaps the role, the duty, of the photographer: to see what others do not see.
This city filled me with horror and deep sadness: SF is a city where you step over human beings without paying attention to them. We do not know if they are still living beings. The sidewalks are overrun with tents, rubbish and bodies… right in the city center, a stone’s throw from the Capitol, close to trendy restaurants…
What amazed me was the general indifference.
Primo Levi wrote a moving account of the denial of humanity in the concentration camps. A stone’s throw from the Capitol of SF, in the heart of the city, humanity is in perdition, in full view of all, but what are we doing?
The looks are haggard in the abandonment of all dignity. Some are in states of total stupefaction, as indifferent as those who walk past them.
I crossed paths with this man or was it a woman, I don’t know, who was wandering aimlessly one morning near the Capitol in San Francisco after rummaging through garbage cans near a tent occupied by another dead man -alive.
I photographed a man who gave me a very sweet smile: maybe he was happy that someone SEEED him? His message takes you to the guts: “Imagine what if this were you? “Imagine if that was you?”, “that”? How did we get here?
Because in this respect, we don’t have much to envy in the United States…
Lydia Kasparian
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