For a few years now I’ve been working on a personal project of sorts. I’ve been shooting portraits of the street performers, buskers, poets, and activists in downtown Santa Cruz. I have to say it has been a rad little project. I’ve used everything from digital capture, Holga, to medium format film. I’ve met some unique and beautiful people and captured some amazing images.

However, that project is effectively over. The Oh So Wise Santa Cruz city leaders who consider themselves good little liberals have enacted laws that have all but driven away the performers away. The intent, as stated, of the laws is to make the down town safer and more hospitable. They claim that the “street people” intimidate folks and harass them thereby driving away business. Really the law is aimed at the homeless who also scrape by a living begging for money/food/pot.

The laws make it illegal for anyone to camp in the city limits. The good folks of Santa Cruz don’t want to build any shelters because no one wants one in their neighborhood, so it is just easier to criminalize poverty. Another law forbids anyone from staying for more than one hour with in a few feet of any tree, bench, building, statue etc. This is the one that catches the performers. There are little ladies in yellow and blue jackets with “Hospitality” across the back of the jacket whose job it is to enforce the law. They drive off these malicious and evil doers who have the audacity to bring their art to the people. The fact that their tags label them as “Hospitality” is a Orwellian accident hasn’t escaped me. I witnessed one of these little ladies ask a man to leave because he was sitting on a window seat in front of a store. Of course the man was clearly a trouble maker. He claimed he was only waiting for his wife to finish her shopping inside but we all know he was really just a wolf in sheep’s clothing waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting shopper.

Any way, my rant, like my project is over.

Hope you enjoy the images as much as I enjoyed capturing them. There are plenty more where these came from.

This woman was among a group of Krishna’s going about doing what they do – you know, annoying people. I was about to pass them on when she began to dance. Mesmerizing isn’t the right word. There was a transcendence to how she moved that for most of her dance I forgot I had my camera. Lucky for me I snapped out of it and got some amazing images of which this is one.

This is Jose Garza. One day he’ll be headlining a punk show, just wait and see.

Curtis is on a crusade to remind the rest of America of our failure to rebuild New Orleans and to raise money for his home town.

Of course no collection of Santa Cruz photography is complete with out The Great Morgani.

Lyrical I is a street/beat/jam poet. A lot of people think they are poets, but this guy has a gift.