St. Petersburg Times :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

Buy It Now

Hard Ground, a coffee-table volume by a great photographer and great songwriter, reminds me of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the haunting collaboration between Walker Evans and James Agee about desperately poor sharecropping farmers in the Depression South, published in 1941.

In their new book, Michael O'Brien and Tom Waits use their considerable gifts to illuminate the Americans many of us try to ignore in the 21st century — the homeless men and women who sleep in our parks and sometimes beg for pocket change on our street corners.

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