Enough is (Never) Enough
September 16 – November 18, 2023

Enough is (never) Enough features photographs and text by artist and educator David Blumenkrantz, along with works by four photographers who have lived experience with homelessness: Bobby Buck, Cleta Felix-West, Lelund Hollins and Ian Storm.

Blumenkrantz, who spent several years advocating and documenting the lives of street children and urban slum dwellers in Nairobi, Kenya before returning to the USA, began photographing life on Skid Row back in the 1990s, though the majority of what will be on display here is from his more recent One of Us project, a collection of portraits and interviews with people experiencing homelessness and those working on solutions, and candid street photography created from 2016 to the present. The motivation behind this work was the desire to remove the filter of media interpretation and let the people most closely affected by the crisis to have their say.

Both the How We See It project and “Enough is (never) Enough” were organized as “service-learning” courses funded by the CSUN Office of Community Engagement. How We See It was part of an Advocacy Media for Nonprofits class, while this current exhibition is the forerunner of an investigative reporting class, during which the students are spending the current semester attempting to investigate and make sense of the Gordian Knot that is our ongoing, festering and often toxic homelessness crisis.

On October 14th there will be a photographers’ talk by all of the artists on display, and on November 11th, the investigative reporting students will make multimedia presentations on their findings.