Book Review: Shopping Bag Ladies by Ann Marie Rousseau

 Shopping Bag Ladies is a photo essay by artist Rousseau accompanied by personal narratives from dozens of unhoused women living in New York City.

It’s all too easy to dismiss and overlook unhoused people if you haven’t endured homelessness yourself or don’t know someone who has. For many people, the homeless are a part of the scenery, a nuisance, or even a source of fear. They are drug addicts, mentally ill, criminals, or just too lazy to get their lives together. Certainly, anyone who is hard-working, studious, and careful with their money would never end up like that. At least, that’s the comforting fantasy many people tell themselves. 

But the narratives in “Shopping Bag Ladies” force the reader to see the history and humanity of its unhoused subjects. These women have, or had, families, loved ones, jobs, even successful careers. They have ended up without stable housing for a myriad of reasons, and there usually is no one event that brought them here.  Their own words drive home how easy it is for anyone to end up unhoused, how fragile shelter and stability actually is.

For example, there is Mary Lou Prentiss, who used to work in music copywriting, meeting people like Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr. Who left her job because the stress was crushing her, eventually found work as a housekeeper before gradually slipping into unemployment.

Another example is Helen (no last name given) who spends her days in libraries, washing up in hospital showers, tracking down restaurant bathrooms. Occasionally she sees her adult daughter, who she says “was pretty broke and so was I”

These stories are not just trauma porn, however. There is tragedy, of course, but the women primarily talk about the simple details of their day-to-day lives. About where they have come from and sometimes where they hope to go. Sometimes they just talk about whatever is on their mind at the moment. Since these are transcripts of recordings, they create a conversational tone that makes it easy to feel familiarity with these women.

Rousseau’s black-and-white photographs are candid and improvised. She captures her subjects within the world they inhabit, sometimes showing them partially obscured by their environment. This artistic choice does sometimes make the images less visually interesting and easy to glass over. But I think that actually fits well with the overarching theme of abandonment and inattentive blindness towards the unhoused.

Though Shopping Bag Ladies is out of print, having been published in 1981, it’s pretty easy to find on Thriftbooks, Ebay, or at your local library (or Amazon too, I suppose) and well worth a read.