Illegal Streets
Illegal Streets depicts some of the difficulties experienced by homeless people in Hungary. Since October 2018, Hungary’s constitutional law has prohibited people from “living in public spaces”, anyone who fails to comply with such an inhumane law could be arrested or sentenced to prison. This basically means that falling into extreme poverty is essentially a crime. A few months before the Pandemic hit, photographer Ilir Tsouko went to Budapest, Hungary’s capital, and documented the lives of homeless people.
Ilir invited the rough sleepers into his studio, offering them cigarettes, coffee and a person to talk to (himself), afterwards he took their portrait, “A black background, a spotlight and my camera was the setting. To make them feel that they are important for what they are, I bought coffee and cigarettes and I put a small table in front of a chair where I invited them to sit and talk to me,”.
“I met homeless people here who wore clean jackets and shoes and had well-groomed hair and watchful eyes. But I understood that the clean clothes served as camouflage. It’s their way to avoid being recognized as homeless.” Ilir noted after talking with the rough sleepers*. If the homeless were to be recognized as such, they could face prison, which meant they needed to avoid the public’s attention as much as possible. As one could imagine this could make their conditions much worse, since that would turn away the help from others.
*People “living rough" = living in the streets or public spaces without a shelter that can be defined a living quarter. (Source: FEANTSA, 2018)
To make matters worse, in 2020 the Covid Pandemic started, and amidst its peak many were confined to their own homes, which wasn’t an option to those who lived on the streets. The shelters in Hungary were greatly inferior to the number of homeless in the country, forcing many of them back to the streets. Besides being at risk getting arrested for being homeless, they are also at risk of contracting as well as dying from the virus.
This photo series and article was originally published by Humans in the EU, a multimedia storytelling project run by Alliance4Europe and funded by the European Parliament. The project, originally founded to humanise the face of the European Union, now is a mosaic platform putting together stories from high level EU figures, alongside people from underrepresented groups, people from minorities, the LGBTIQ+ community, women, and in general people from all walks of life. Humans in the EU is about telling real stories about real people, to illustrate the diversity and depth of this continent we live in.