Book Description

Depicts the dangers children face from poverty, drugs, and violence. Documentary photography at its most affecting, Outside the dream rivets attention on one of our most urgent social problems: the more than 12 million children of poverty adrift in an affluent society. From 1984-1989, photographer Stephen Shames devoted himself to a major photographic study which chronicles the lives of the one out of five children in the United States who live in poverty...While documenting the plight of children living below the poverty line, Shames intimately experience daily existence in welfare hotels and abandoned buildings; he documented children living in cars, seeking shelter in churches, and struggling to survive without electricity or water. Shames' extraordinary eye bears witness to the heartbreaking and the heroic: the children who are too tired or ashamed to go to school, and the love which binds families together even in the worst of situations. The photographs which comprise Outside the dream evoke the unflinching emotional commitment of Jacob Riis' How the other half lives and Walker Evans' Let us now praise famous men. An introduction by eminent journalist Jonathan Kozol completes this stirring work.