vagabondia - book - 1995 - The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City

The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City
Margaret Morton
Yale University Press
1995
148 pages

Margaret Morton is a New York City based professor at The Cooper Union School of Art and a photographer who has made a career out of producing images of the city’s homeless communities.  The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City is one of a series of photo-books Morton has published in which the dwelling structures of such marginal populations are represented.  She has called her photographic project The Architecture of Despair, and she has functioned as an advocate for the unpropertied urban poor, in addition to representing their dwellings and lifestyles via the camera lens.  

Morton’s The Tunnel is a photographic companion to Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People, a book already profiled on this blog.  Morton takes a different approach to the subject matter from Toth, choosing to structure it around photographs of the makeshift underground domestic spaces belonging to particular individuals, rather than deploying the journalist's strategies of information gathering.  Still, there is a significant amount of overlap between the two tunnel books.  Toth discusses a man named Bernard who assumes the role of tunnel-dweller representative.  The Tunnel begins with images of a man named Bernard, presumably Toth’s Bernard, and all other individuals in Morton’s book allude to some kind of personal relationship with Bernard.  For both of the tunnel authors Bernard was a diplomat of the underground realm.  Morton’s book is quite rich in the detail it provides of the people who live beneath New York streets, but like with The Mole People, the reader (myself, specifically) is left wondering what existed in the dark underworld beyond the reach of the author’s guide.

Morton creates a immanent experience of the tunnels and their inhabitants for her readers.  She focuses on appealing to the senses of the reader.  Her book includes 60 black and white photographs of tunnel habitations, many of which display many of the amenities of an above ground home (albeit these amenities conditioned by the circumstances of homelessness), including cooking space, decorations (sometimes graffiti murals), seating and bedding, and even pets.  Morton also includes a number of poetic images of the empty tunnels which sometimes featuring graffiti murals, sometimes featuring some of the plant life that manages to grow under the street.  Such photos of vacant tunnels convey a sense of the isolation the tunnel dwellers may feel, but they also convey a sense of peace from the dangers of the city at street level.

In addition to the sense of sight, Morton also appeals to the reader’s sense of hearing.  The book is subdivided into short sections, often under the heading of an individual dweller’s first name.  Accompanying the images pertaining to that dweller is a text of his or her words, transposed from tape-recorded interviews conducted by Morton.  The Tunnel is a textual-oral account of how a number of individuals came to live in NYC’s tunnel system, as the subterranean’s of Morton’s acquaintance describe their (often fractured) relationships with their families, their addictions, and their often Thoreau-esque daily routines.  Morton edited the discussions with the dwellers in her transposition although she attempted to preserve their language.  Many of the individuals describe a preference for the tunnels to the street-level life, and they also speak proudly of their abilities to take care of themselves rather than accept charity.  Morton has produced an artful book of images and statements of a marginal group of people that is both respectful of their pride, and sensitive to their condition.  The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City, is a strong addition to the literature on the communities who live in the underground infrastructure of an American city.