Please pardon our dust! We're improving the presentation of the "Gutter Tribe" images and fixing a few broken links. Hang in there...
Introduction
Photojournalist Jana Birchum spent 6 weeks in January and February, 1995, chronicling the lives of young homeless living on the streets of Austin, Texas. Her dramatic photographs were first presented in the March 24, 1995 edition of The Austin Chronicle. We're proud to present an expanded collection of these images to the World Wide Web community.We encourage you to read Jana Birchum's introduction to this exhibit.
There are two distinct galleries here. Each presents a different selection of photographs, and allows you to navigate through the images in different ways. You're welcome to try them each and send us your comments.
Enter the galleries
- 1-bit (black and white) interactive gallery -- An interactive exhibit in which different juxtapositions are at your control. Because of the small image sizes, this is also optimized for those with slow Internet connections, e.g. over a modem.
-
8-bit (grayscale) overview gallery -- A top-level overview of many of Jana Birchum's "Gutter Tribe" photographs, many never published before. These are large images, and are best for those with fast Internet connections, e.g. over an Ethernet network.
Read the story
Browse the conference transcript
A live Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conference with the artist and some of Austin's young homeless at Project PHASE was held on Monday, March 27th. As our first attempt at doing a live remote IRC session, things went fairly well. We discovered that though IRC is a dynamic medium, it's sometimes difficult to turn thoughts into cohesive threads in a multi-person conversation. (Nearly 10 people were in on the Project PHASE end, talking through a single typist.) Nevertheless, many interesting ideas surfaced and everyone got a chance to speak. A transcript of the conference is available.
Resources
A Project PHASE information page is now available.
Homeless information from Stanford University's Yahoo catalogue includes a documentary on homeless life in Covington, Kentucky, by photographer John Decker.
Colophon
This gallery is a service of The Austin Chronicle. A member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, the Chronicle is the source for insightful news and commentary on Austin's city-culture ‹ covering politics, the visual and performing arts, music and more.
A pre-alpha test of The Austin Chronicle's home page contains the text of recent issues, and this week's entertainment and classified listings.
Please read the copyright notice for this exhibit.
The Gutter Tribe exhibit was conceived and developed by Outgoing Art Director Ben Davis and Online Coordinator Laxman Gani. We're still learning the ropes in Web publishing, so we'd appreciate your feedback on our efforts. Thanks for visiting!