Charles H. Traub: Skid Row

These on-the-spot portraits of "the fallen"--the homeless of late 1970s New York and Chicago--were taken by New York-based photographer Charles H. Traub (born 1945) to reveal the dignity and unexamined humanity of those who were once intrinsic to the urban experience of American cities. In Traub's own words: "It is my hope that these photographs of the tenants of the streets of uptown Chicago and the Bowery New York serve as a tribute to the grace of the 'down and out.'"

Indifference and gentrification have displaced those who once inhabited the shelters that nurtured them. They were known to their neighbors by their names, eccentricities and their plight. Nelson Algren's famous book A Walk on the Wild Side asks why "lost people sometimes develop to greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their lives"; Traub's Skid Row confirms both this idea and these inhabitants' place in the fabric of the city.