Exhibitions 2025

The Street People

Irving Greines, an 83-year-old street photographer based in Los Angeles, has been making photographs for over fifty years. While his subjects vary widely, he most frequently opts to shoot in the blighted, gritty, dirtier areas of major cities like Los Angeles and New York. With minimal gear (a camera and single lens), Irving randomly wanders amidst the decay seeking to make fine-art photographs where ugliness predominates and beauty is scarce. The Washington Post characterized Irving’s images as capturing the “beauty of ugliness” and “beauty amidst ugliness.”

This exhibit (“The Street People”) emerged from these explorations. As Irving roamed, he regularly observed mushrooming populations of mostly unhoused people living on the streets, but he refrained from making any photographs because he felt that doing so might be viewed as intrusive and exploitative.

About eight years ago, however, Irving’s photographic instincts overpowered his restraint. He started photographing the sadness and disarray he regularly encountered, his purposes being to document what he was observing, to do so with as much photographic integrity as he could muster, and to exhibit the resulting images hoping they might help stimulate greater interest in ameliorating the hardships the street people daily encountered. Irving is committed never to sell or profit from any of the images in this series.