Los Angeles Times
City Times (excerpts)   Nov. 29, 1992To express his views on the oppression of women, Hector Barcenas used bold, dramatic hues to paint a club-weiding woman stomping down a red path toward the stoic figures of a man and his dog. Colored cubes, symbolizing the frustration of her “blocked ideas.” frame the oil painting.

Vincent Richards used more obvious images to express his view about another societal problem--poverty. RIchards took a photography of Sunday food lines in from of Los Angeles City Hall.

Barcenas and Richards are homeless men in Los Angles. Barcenas lives in an abandoned house in Echo Park; Richards sleeps on a 3rd Street sidewalk. And both men have been given the opportunity to express their thoughts and emotions through art programs. ---- additionally, a professional photographer recently enlisted the homeless in a third program--yelping her produce a photographic art project about life in the streets

--Friendships were the recurring theme in photographs taken by street people as part of another art experiment funded by the Cultural Affairs Department. Professional photographer Jean Ferro used a $5,000 grant to distribute disposable cameras to 30 homeless people in Downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Ferro, a Hollywood resident, have her photographers a weekend to take pictures of whatever they desired. She drove through Skid Row and Hollywood on Oct. 31, randomly handing out cameras and a booklet of basic photography tips. She specified that she would return to the same spots Nov. 2 to pick up the cameras. All of them were returned.
Some of the photographs take on an architectural theme, with shots of the Downtown skyline or the buildings that are most familiar to the photographers, such as the warehouses and missions where they find shelter. Ferro said she was impressed with the angles in some of these pictures, particualry those of one woman who lives on the sidewalk near 5th and Towne Streets.

“She had a nice sense of compositon and movement,” Ferro said as she reviewed the womens photographs of buildings in Little Tokyo and Downtown. “She’s very talented.”

Another man took close-ups of pigeons, a man and his baby and the bloodied face of person who had been beaten up. Yet another man took landscape shots of the greenery and statues in a nearby park.

The participants themselves seemed surprised at the quality of their work. When Ferro returned with copies of his pictures, Richards initially reacted by saying, “They’re probably horrible.”

But as he reviewed the photographs, Richards exclaimed with glee, “I took that? Those cameras are terrific! It’s not me--it’s the camera.”

Richards, a spry, witty 66 year-old who faithfully sweeps the sidewalk where he sleeps, said he decided to photograph the Sunday food lines at City Hall, “to show that underneath the Establishment is the food line . . . We really have a problem.”

Said Ferro: “These are real people. I felt a lot of warmth and a lot of caring among them. I told them, “If you want to take 24 pictures of a buy crawling on the ground, that’s fine!” My main concern was to give them the chance to express themselves.