The Memphis Daily News :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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O’Brien’s Lens is ‘Passport to the World’
By Andy Meek

Michael O’Brien regards his camera as more than just the tool of his profession. O’Brien, a former Memphian who now lives in Austin, Texas, considers it his “passport to the world.”

Most recently, he’s let that passport carry him to the homeless and disadvantaged people who eke out their lives on the forgotten corners and mean streets of America – the outcasts who live on, as his most recent photo collection is titled, “Hard Ground.”

At press time, “Hard Ground” – published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press and which is now in a second printing – was still one of top 10 best books of 2011 so far, as chosen by the editors of Amazon.com.

For the book, O’Brien’s often haunting images are married alongside the poetry of singer-songwriter Tom Waits. The photos of O’Brien’s subjects are mostly close-up and in black-and-white.

In press material for “Hard Ground,” photographer John Loengard – whom American Photo magazine has called one of the “100 most influential people in photography” – called the collection a “rare and powerful book.”

The product is familiar territory for O’Brien. He began his career as a staff photographer for the Miami News, and his photo essays depicting the homeless have won him two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.

He’s 61 today, and he’s spent more than half his life – a period of some four decades – as a photographer. Recently, the National Portrait Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, acquired several of his photos.

“I feel that I was really fortunate to get out of college and get a job at a newspaper where I could make a living with a camera,” he said. “Not because so much of the photographic process or the artistry, but instead because of the life it exposed me to. All the places I got to go. All the people I got to meet.

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Texas Observer :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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by Dave Mann

In 2006, Michael O’Brien, a veteran photojournalist who’s shot for Life, National Geographic, Texas Monthly and many other publications, took on a different kind of assignment.

An Austin-based ministry called Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which aids the homeless, was looking for a photographer to document the people it served. O’Brien was looking for something to do. The changing media landscape had made life as a freelance photographer increasingly difficult. As O’Brien writes in the introduction to the new book Hard Ground (University of Texas Press, $40, 184 pages), “Newspapers were dying, magazines struggling in earnest. There were fewer assignments. My career was changing. I was looking for a way to stay busy.”

He began going to the Mission: Possible! Community Center in East Austin every Tuesday to photograph the homeless people who came in for a free meal and a place to sleep. What started as an effort to stay busy quickly grew into much more. O’Brien spent the next three years photographing and documenting the stories of homeless people in Austin.

In Hard Ground, O’Brien’s haunting photographs of the homeless are paired with poetry by musician Tom Waits. To make his photographs, O’Brien used an old view camera. “This is a large, bulky camera that sits atop a tripod … a view camera is slow and deliberate,” he writes in the book’s introduction. With a view camera, the subject must remain completely still or the photo will be out of focus. O’Brien also employed a black-and-white Polaroid film called Type 55, which produces a negative and print at the same time. When O’Brien took his photos, he kept the negative and handed the print to his subject.

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Houston Chronicle :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

Buy It Now

Bookish
A book blog with Maggie Galehouse

"Texas Titles: Lone Star reads…

Hard Ground, by Michael O’Brien and Tom Waits. A stunning book from the University of Texas Press, Hard Ground combines photographs by Michael O’Brien with poems by Tom Waits to create an arresting portrait of homelessness. This book looks at people who live “on the hard ground” and celebrates their resilience. (University of Texas Press)"

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The Guardian :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

Buy It Now

Hard Ground, poems by Tom Waits, photographs by Michael O'Brien
Can Tom Waits do with poetry what he does in song?  - review

review excerpt:

" ... With any sung lyric, the music's rhythmic values dictate the articulation of the words in a way that will differ from the natural rhythms of speech, which is what written poetry is primarily concerned with. And the line repetitions that are a fundamental part of song structure simply die on the page. While song may share 99% of poetry's DNA, it isn't poetry, any more than, say, a chimpanzee is a bonobo.

That said, however, this is a powerful book. O'Brien's subjects – white, black, male, female, young and old, a couple of families with small children – are all photographed against the same grey background. Some look defiant, some haunted or afraid. At the end of the book there's a series of brief quotes from each of the subjects. Some lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina, others have been dragged down by drink, drugs or mental illness. Brian Lohse, 53, has been homeless for 15 years and still can't quite make sense of his situation: "I didn't think there was any such thing as a homeless Republican, but the Lord will get your attention one way or another."

In his introduction O'Brien writes: "'Taking a photograph' is a common expression, and indeed, the subject is giving something away to the photographer. But there is reciprocity . . . and in this case, each subject received something tangible – a print that bore testament to a life." That's the key to his project – it's a concrete acknowledgment of people whom most of us would prefer to pass by in silence, an avowal that they exist, and that they can do so with full human dignity."

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Austin American-Statesman :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

Buy It Now

Photographer puts a face on Austin's homeless
by Andrea Ball


Stephen Blair stands on the corner of North Lamar Boulevard and Fifth Street, holding a large book against his chest and tapping his own image on the cover.


"That's me," he tells passing motorists, holding out his empty Starbucks cup and silently begging for spare change.


Blair, 55, is the face of "Hard Ground," a new coffee-table book filled with photographs of Austin's homeless. The black-and-white images were taken by Austin photographer Michael O'Brien, whose work has appeared in publications including National Geographic, Texas Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. The photos are accompanied by poems by O'Brien's longtime friend, musician Tom Waits.

Blair's portrait — a tight shot highlighting his dark eyes, tousled hair and full beard — is the cover shot.

"It was timeless," O'Brien says of the photo. "There was sort of an innocence, a fragility and vulnerability."

"Hard Ground" was inspired in 2006 when O'Brien, 60, saw a lull in his freelance business. To stay busy, he volunteered to take photographs for Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a local nonprofit that bring meals to homeless people in parks and other public areas. But when the volunteer job was done, O'Brien kept taking photos.  Read More »

La Lettre de la Photographie :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien
Poems by Tom Waits

Buy It Now

Michael O'Brien Hard Ground

Michael O’Brien took pictures on Tuesdays at a Catholic ministry that feeds and houses the homeless. He spent two years doing it in Austin, Texas, starting in 2006. Eighty-eight of his photographs alternate with brief sections of poetry by singer-songwriter Tom Waits in O’Brien’s book Hard Ground, published March 1st by the University of Texas Press.

Other collections of lost souls (Richard Avedon’s In the American West comes to mind) are different. We meet O’Brien’s people one on one. Their “otherness” is removed. The photographs engender compassion and empathy. If that sounds simple, it is because it is simple. And, as anyone knows, being simple is very, very difficult. Hard Ground is a rare and powerful book.

“After thirty-five years working as a photographer for magazines such as Life, National Geographic, Texas Monthly and others," O’Brien points out that by 2006 “the business had changed. Newspapers were dying, magazines struggling in earnest. My career was changing; I was looking for a way to stay busy … These gentle, worn, and vulnerable souls sat quietly across from me and looked directly into the lens … I wasn’t close to living on the street. But I was uprooted by the industry’s change; I too was unsettled, floundering, often unemployed, trying to regain my balance and place. This project, and these subjects, gave me back my anchor.”

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American Songwriter :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien
Poems by Tom Waits
Buy It Now

Tom Waits and Michael O’Brien: Hard Ground
By Greg Gaston

May 2nd, 2011 at 5:00 am

In a gritty but affecting collaborative book of photographs and poetry, Michael O’Brien and Tom Waits offer up a compassionate portrait of America’s homeless. Between O’Brien’s black-and-white pictures and Waits’ boho nursery rhyme verse, this collection aches for the plight of the indigent, the disenfranchised, and the ones lost among us on our country’s mean streets.

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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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