Shortly after sunrise on a cloudy Tuesday, J.M. Simpson, a retired history professor, headed into downtown Olympia in search of a photo that could change someone’s mind. 

After parking his car by the water, the 71-year-old with close-cropped hair and a toothy grin slung a beat-up backpack over his shoulder carrying water, snacks and, though he doesn’t smoke, a pack of Camel cigarettes. Then he started walking. And walking. He would walk more than 15,000 steps before returning home in neighboring Lacey a few hours later.

It was overcast, perfect lighting. Dressed in a dark T-shirt, cargo pants, worn-out boots and an old rain jacket, Simpson had intended to look “invisible.” But that can be hard when you’re carrying a camera.

Eventually, he came across a woman lying in a parking lot off Fourth Avenue. “Hi John, how are you?” she asked. He’d gotten to know Elizabeth over the past several months. She told him she had spent the night on her back in an alley under some blankets. He asked if he could take her picture. He always asks.

“You know what I hear more often than not? Thank you for asking.” 

For the last 19 months, Simpson has crisscrossed Olympia by foot, armed with his camera—always one camera, one lens—to bring attention to the capital’s homelessness crisis. His work isn’t widely known. It mostly appears in the local, nonprofit news outlet The JOLT, where he has written about his experience documenting the unhoused and what he views as an inadequate response by local authorities to their plight. 

As a journalist who writes about homelessness, I was struck by Simpson’s photography. His portraits, typically in black and white, exude a level of intimacy and respect for his subjects that’s too often missing in media coverage of the unhoused, which often treats the homeless as a monolith.

Frequently, those he photographs peer into the lens as if locking eyes with the viewer, daring them to look away.

“These people are looking back at us,” Paul Schofield, a political philosopher at Bates College, told Simpson after the photographer sent him his photos last fall. The professor said it felt like a “special treasure” had fallen into his lap. I came across Simpson’s work after Schofield posted a thread of his photos on X, previously known as Twitter, that’s garnered about 24,000 likes.. 

Simpson agrees with Schofield’s observation about the illusion of eye contact, something many of us try to avoid when we encounter a homeless person. “Look these people in the eye—because they’re looking at you—and tell them, ‘No,’” said Simpson. 

His project comes at an inflection point for Americans without a home. 

In July, the US Supreme Court paved the way for cities to penalize people for sleeping or camping in public even if nearby shelters are full. The ruling isn’t intended to target the homeless, argued associate justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority decision. But homeless advocates warn that it could unleash a wave of municipal bans that could, in the words of Seattle University law professor Sara Rankin, effectively make it “not legal for you to exist if you don’t have a home.”

The national homeless population is pegged at more than 650,000, though that's all but certainly an undercount, according to experts. The latest estimate, the highest on record, rose by 12 percent from 2022, fueled by a decline in pandemic assistance and the rising cost of housing, and made worse by a growing mental health crisis and increasingly deadly and addictive street drugs.

In Washington, like Oregon and California, rates of homelessness are higher than most states. Last year, the number of unsheltered homeless in Washington—meaning those not living in shelters, transitional housing or the like—jumped by 21 percent from 2022. (King County was excluded from the total because it didn’t do a Point-in-Time count last year.)

“You need to be aware of this.” That’s what Simpson tells critics who question his motive. “And if you’re not willing to look at this, then don’t look at it. But there’s a picture, and you cannot deny that. I was there. Here’s the picture. This is reality. Deal with it.” (Until the publication of this story, he says he had never been paid for this work.)

Open up a random article on homelessness and you may find a semi-anonymous photo of an unhoused person that appears to have been taken surreptitiously. Sometimes you’ll see a stock image featuring a model caricaturing homelessness. 

Granted, there are legitimate reasons for anonymizing an unhoused person in reporting. Usually, it’s to protect their privacy or identity. But even so, it feels just as easy to ignore these depictions as it is to breeze past a tent in the park. 

This kind of treatment in the press is hardly new, nor isolated. A 2022 study of American media coverage on homelessness found that unhoused people were frequently photographed without eye contact and their names rarely mentioned, further dehumanizing the homeless in the public eye, according to researchers. (As a Canadian, I can assure you this isn’t exclusive to the US.)

And now there’s a trend of YouTubers and TikTokkers dropping into notorious neighborhoods, like San Francisco’s Tenderloin, to film the city’s most vulnerable for clicks. The intent seems not to encourage sympathy or help viewers understand the systemic causes involved. Instead, those featured—often suffering from addiction or mental health issues or both—serve as morbid spectacles, pawns sometimes used, whether they know it or not, to score political points and rack up views.

Besides stigma, exploitation, laziness, or just poor editorial judgment, there’s a fundamental and fairly obvious reason why so many depictions of the homeless are dehumanizing: homelessness is itself dehumanizing.

It’s not as if Simpson scrubs the grit from his photos. Squalid living conditions. Public drug use. Desperate searches for food. The hardiness required to survive the street appears again and again, particularly in how it ages a person: the wrinkles and fine lines that frame weary eyes. It’s all there. 

But there’s more. Simpson’s photography also proves that genuine community and culture exist among those living rough. His work is raw, but it’s not always grim. It reflects the complex nature of both homelessness and the humans caught up in it for any number of reasons. People first, homeless second.

Above all, his portraits leave you wanting to know more: Where did they come from? Who do they love? What went wrong?

“It’s easy to imagine them having friends and having dreams and having things that they care about just as a result of sitting there with the photo for a few minutes,” noted Schofield, whose writing on homelessness had caught Simpson’s attention.

“It’s got to be something about him that brings this out,” Schofield concluded.

Samantha Gilbertson, an intensive case manager with Northwest Resources II who was once homeless herself, agrees. “He takes the time to build relationships and really get to know someone and see them as a human being, not as a poster child.”

For more than 25 years, Simpson taught history at Pierce College while living in Lakewood, where he served on city council. During his breaks, the former US Air Force reservist, who’s married with children, would sometimes embed with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as a wartime photographer.

He says he never ignored the homeless. But something changed in him after he encountered a young, intoxicated man slumped in an Olympia alley early last year, his worried friend standing over him. Now, he goes on long walks with his camera once or twice a week. 

His approach is key: “I don’t stand over somebody. I sit down on the ground.” He’ll ask for their name and their story. Sometimes he’ll chat with a person for months before they let him take their picture. “I use the verb take deliberately because I am taking something,” he said. “I do it with their permission. But that doesn’t get around the fact that I am taking something from them.” He also never uses continuous shooting. One photo at a time. Sometimes no more than two or three. He doesn’t want to be rude. 

He counts the Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange, famous for her photo entitled Migrant Mother,  as an inspiration. She recognized, says Simpson, that there’s not only a relationship between the photographer and the subject but also one between the subject and the person looking at the photo. 

“And that relationship between the subject and the viewer has to be honest.”
Unfortunately, that’s not up to him.