Homeless people: Images and imaginaries

Abstract

This article argues that the construction of social imaginaries around homelessness, which usually focus on the individual variables involved in situations of exclusion, have given way to a broader understanding of homelessness as part of a process of residential exclusion of structural scope. However, both imaginaries, that of the individual causes and that of the structural causes of homelessness, struggle in social practice. Thus, we start from the idea that the different social imaginaries around homelessness are related, in a dialectic way, with the images, produced by different media, of situations in which life in public space is susceptible to be scrutinized in its daily life. In this sense, our analysis of the photographs taken by the journalist Rafa Arjones in the city of Alicante (Spain), between 2002 and 2020, has as its main objectives (Meert and et al., 2004) [1] to reveal these relationships (Rubio-Martín, 2017) [2], to describe which imaginaries may be influencing the production of images on homele02222ssness and (Caeiro and y Gonçalves, 2015) [3] to reveal how the photographer reproduces or questions them throughout the period studied. To achieve these objectives, our analysis is based on a comprehensive Weberian sociology and a hermeneutic/interpretative methodology that attempts to reveal the inner meaning of the photographic images from the external ideological discourse. The findings of our study point to a shift in the photographs analysed, from an approach to homelessness that highlights individual situations to one that seeks contradiction and a focus on the structural problem of access to housing. This is in line with wider social changes that may be occurring in imaginaries of homelessness.