From 2015 to 2020 I traveled from Maine, to Florida, to California, to Washington documenting homelessness in America. In more than 70 towns and cities across America I met with service providers and with hundreds of persons experiencing homelessness. This 218 page book of black and white film images reveals the human side of a story too often reported only in numbers.

HOW TO ORDER: Copies of HOMELESS IN A LAND OF PENTY are now available. If you are interested in seeing more fully the face of America’s homeless, write me at mark@schumannphoto.com with your mailing address. You can also send a message through this website’s “CONTACT” page. Payment of $10 to cover postage and handling can be made via Venmo to @Mark-Schumann-9, or through my PayPal account with an email address of m_schumann@bellsouth.net.

Sincerely, Mark Schumann, 136 Mejor Lado, Santa Fe, NM 87508, m_schumann@bellsouth.net

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Excerpt from the introduction to “Homeless in a Land of Plenty”

I woke up early and slipped quietly out of the boarding-house-style bed and breakfast where I was staying in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. Approaching the intersection of Haight and Central on foot, I noticed a man sitting on the sidewalk. Unshaven, clothes dirty and wrinkled, he appeared to have had a rough night. As I approached, he glanced up at me and softly asked, “Do you have some tobacco?”

“No,” I replied, “I don’t smoke. But do you mind if I sit down here with you.”

“Help yourself,” he said. Making steady eye contact now, he seemed puzzled by my interest in him.

I said, “Do you mind if I ask if you spent the night on the street?”

As it appeared, he had slept out, and he smelled of alcohol.

I gave him my name, and explained that I was traveling the country to document homelessness in America. 

“Well, my name is Bill,” he said.

Over the next half hour, Bill and I shared a conversation touching on constitutional law, Calvinist theology, addiction, and finally on the struggles of the homelessness.

“May I make a picture of you sitting here,” I asked. 

He agreed. After making several images, I placed my camera back in my shoulder bag, pulled out my wallet, asked how much cigarettes cost in San Francisco, and handed Bill what he would need to buy a pack.

“Thank you,” he said, accepting the money from my hand.

“Goodbye, Bill,” I said, “Take care of yourself.”

A year earlier, when my wife, Cheri, and I were living in Taos, New Mexico, the thought occurred to me early one morning that I should draw on my distant background in photojournalism to document the current and growing crisis of homelessness in America. At the time, I was making images of the northern New Mexico landscape, giving private photography tours, and managing a small art gallery. Later that same day, I more or less wandered into a used book store. There, prominently displayed on the front table, was a copy of “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,” a book about the life and work of the Depression-era photographer. Lange, of course, made the photograph, “Migrant Mother,” which became an iconic image of the Great Depression.

Coming across a book about Lange on the same day I first had the idea for a project documenting homelessness was something I took, not as a coincidence, but a message to move forward. Within a few weeks, I found myself photographing and interviewing in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, and eventually in some 70 cities across the country, from Portland, Maine, to Orlando Florida, to San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington…