Focus on the Social Margins

Art that looks closely at people pushed to the edges of society: the poor, homeless, migrant and outcast.

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About

Art focused on the social margins looks at people society overlooks or pushes aside: the poor, the homeless, migrants and other outsiders. The challenge is to show them without pity or spectacle. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's The Young Beggar (c. 1645–50) delouses himself in a patch of Seville sunlight, and Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers (1849) gives two road labourers the scale of history painting. Luke Fildes's Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874) lines up London's destitute in the snow.

Documentary photography sharpened the focus. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936) was taken at a pea pickers' camp in California during the Depression, and Don McCullin photographed homeless men in East London around 1970. Chris Killip's In Flagrante (1988) records de-industrialising north-east England, and Jim Goldberg's Raised by Wolves (1995) grew from years with runaway teenagers in California. John Sonsini paints the day labourers who sit for him in Los Angeles.