Dede Tisone

Despite the lack of affordable housing and increasing gentrification and displacement, U.S. cities have continued to attack homeless people through criminalization. More concerned about keeping homeless people from the public gaze rather than providing housing to women, children,  adults, people with disabilities, and elderly people,  there has been an increase in anti-homeless laws across the nation.  ...More from the Street Sheet

A Visual Journalist documents society and preserves history through images. And I have chosen to document homelessness in San Francisco.  Homelessness is not only a San Francisco problem.  Anyone who has seen the vast swaths of makeshift shelters on the streets of Los Angeles – or the serge of tent encampments in Oakland – knows that deprivation knows no city boundaries.  I want my drawings to be part of the solution and not part of the problem 

A long time ago, I remember reading a book called Zen and the Art of Seeing by Frederick Franck.  In it, I remember him saying that to really know a place you have to draw it.  I have searched and searched for that quote and haven't been able to track it down.  So today I pulled out another of his books called  Zen Seeing Zen Drawing which, I think, is a a newer revision of the first book.   I still haven't found that first quote but I found several others.  He says in this book that there is a difference between sketching and drawing.  "A sketch is the product of looking-at....A drawing is the result of seeing."  He says that "a true drawing is a very private dialogue between the artist within and some facet of the world around him or her."  And he concludes with " Seeing/drawing is more than making pictures.  It is witnessing to this seeing, it is touching the Meaning.  The artist-within is the one who sees and witnesses to this seeing whether....Bach, Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca, Rilke...."