Do You Know Helen?

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Protest is always at the crux of my work. I try to capture the images of dignity, elegance and suffering of a people who are trying to survive on nothing…Poverty is visible for all to see, but what seems to be invisible is seeing poor people as individuals--the dignity, beauty, and hope that continue to live despite the desperate battle for survival."
--Helen M. Stummer

Do you know Helen?

In No Easy Walk, and other works, she took the daddy by the hand and quietly led him down a long ghetto street in Newark. The cold, hard sidewalk was lined with McDonald hamburger wrappers, empty potato chip bags and an assortment of trash.

They stopped at an apartment building and she introduced him to Carol. Carol was a woman of low income and, seemingly not much else. But if you thought that, you would be wrong. You see, Carol had a brain, dogged, tough-as-nails determination to survive and a natural born ability to form social networks of people in her apartment building and in her neighborhood to utilize what meager resources they had to live. And hat’s why Helen M. Stummer is so important: she took pictures but, through Carol, documented something more, something in poor women, in poor people, in all of us, our struggles, our hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow.

They walked a bit farther and she stopped to take pictures again. It was a makeshift street memorial. There, a series of bottles were lined up near the sidewalk with the labels of certain brands lined neatly in rows, respectively. A middle-aged, very dark-skinned black lady was sitting close to the bottles, just to the right of them. Helen took her picture but showed something more: the unmistakable sadness and overwhelming frustration with the relentless violence in her community, violence with seemingly no end; And, by extension, she documented that, with the drug dealing, the stench of urine in dark hallways and stairwells, absentee landlords, welfare restrictions, police harassment, poor school systems combined with the construction of shopping malls and middle class homes nearby, few people would disagree that most folks don’t care about poor people in the central ward of Newark, or poor folks in central wards of this nation.

Then they walked back toward this apartment building, at 322 Irving Turner Boulevard. People knew her there because she had been documenting the lives of people there for years.

They weren’t there long before hordes of children burst out of their apartments to greet Helen's cheery “Hello!” with overwhelming excitement, jumping up and down, screaming “Take my picture! Take my picture!” And there, amid dirty walls spray-painted with grafitti, a cold sidewalk and trash, she took their pictures but but showed something more: the broad smiles, the youthful exuberance, and the sweet innocence that no amount of poverty, desolation or shopping malls nearby could take away.

Robert Snyder, editor of the Newark Metro, wrote:

Photographer Helen M. Stummer takes pictures of good people living in bad conditions. Like Lewis Hine, who photographed workers in the early twentieth century, her work appreciates the dignity of individuals while exposing their unhealthy surroundings.”

Do you know Helen? She takes images but shows something more…Have you ever looked through the dark clouds of poverty and saw in a child's eyes a heavenly sun?
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Note: Helen M. Stummer can be reached at: http://www.hmstummer.com/index.htm