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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
"Hands," photographed in St. Louis
Health care researchers have discovered that the average homeless adult suffers from 8 or 9 concurrent medical conditions, including respiratory infections, dental decay, vision problems, STDs, psychological trauma, and a number of skin disorders.
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Jerry, U.S. Air Force, Photographed February 14, 2013, Nashville, Tennessee
“He got out early, because he’d crushed his knee. He got a job working for a famous country and western group. He was the bus driver. They kept him coked up—there was coke everywhere—and if he looked like he wasn’t coked up, they’d give him more. We had to go back a week later, and I ran into him again. He said, ‘I’m so glad you came. I wanted to tell you, since you were here, I got to thinking, and I went out, I found myself a job as a painter, it looks like I’m going to be busy all summer, if not longer.’ He loved his wife, but he burnt that bridge. He told me, ‘Since we talked, I called my wife, and it looks like we might be getting back together.’ I thought, ‘Well, that was enough to be cool.’ But then about two weeks before my [Missouri History Museum] show opened, he called me from outside of Memphis, where he and a couple of other homeless people were busy helping build shelters for homeless veterans.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Phil, U.S. Navy, Photographed March 3, Fort Pierce, Florida
“He goes by ‘Bluebeard.’ That little patch on his lip there? That’s blue magic marker. He was in Vietnam. He was a corpsman, a medic. He was the person who had the first view when the people came in with their legs and arms blown off, the ugly stuff. He still remembers that, and when he stops and thinks about it, he gets very emotional. His family is from Louisiana. His dad invented the 911 system. His mother was the most caring, sympathetic person he knew, and she’s buried out in Louisiana. He actually called the president of the United States, and he wasn’t there, and the president [Barack Obama], called him back. He did keep in touch. I’m afraid he’s dead now, too, but there’s no way I can check.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Ronnie, U.S. Army, Photographed July 6, 2013, Indianapolis
“He looks like a Hollywood thug, like a Dick Tracy character, but he was a nice-enough man. I have a friend from St. Louis who’s in the movie business, and I sent him a picture, asking if he could be cast. Those white spots on his chest, he had a battery explode on him. Those are acid burns—post-military. He wrote a poem for us, and I asked him if he would write another one for us, specifically about the forgotten warrior. And he did. Ronnie was an alcoholic before he went in, and the judge gave him the choice of going to prison or the Army. He took the Army. I said, ‘Well, Ronnie, I guess that straightened your ass out.’ And he goes, ‘No. It was far worse in the Army. The availability of alcohol in the Army is amazing; I was in Germany and we drank beer like crazy. I was a mess when I got out.’ Sad story was, they found Ronnie dead a few weeks after we took this. He’d been dead for about a week. He was supposed to be on some sort of respirator, and they didn’t find that with him.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Ronald, U.S. Marine Corps, Photographed April 16, 2013, D.C.
“Ronald was the most fascinating of all the people we met. We lined up people at the CCNV for shoots, but Ronald was a street guy who just happened to walk by. We stopped him and asked him if he was a veteran. And he was a Marine. I said, ‘Can you tell me more about it?’ And he started reciting, word for word, the manual for the M16 rifle. He’s a bit of a genius. He was also a conundrum, because he has a degree as an accountant, but he found that didn’t work for him, and life on the street worked for him. He apparently came from a wealthy family. He does see his mother regularly. At one point, I said, ‘This doesn’t feel right. Are you part of the CIA or something?’ And he said, ‘Let’s just say my name is No. 1 on some lists.’ He is a Baptist minister and a Buddhist monk both. I said, ‘Isn’t that kind of a contradiction?’ And he said, ‘If you know anything about the two religions, you can see where it’s not.’”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Elizabeth, U.S. Navy, Photographed February 23, 2013, Titusville, Florida
“She had a little compound with a tent. She kept the whole area very clean, and she had a pit bull. I said, ‘I worry for you. Are you not concerned being out here by yourself?’ She says, ‘No, my dog lets me know if anyone’s coming, and after that, I can take care of myself.’ She was hoping to get an apartment, and they had just found her one. She just doesn’t seem to be suited for that life. She was the person who, when I said to her, ‘People say you like it out here,’ said, ‘No, I don’t like it out here! Look around. I don’t have running water; I live hand-to-mouth. I don’t like it. People think it’s just like a camping trip, and it’s not.’”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Willie, U.S. Air Force and Navy, Photographed February 14, Nashville, Tennessee
“He’s from St. Charles, but he settled in Nashville. He was technically a cook, but he was on a secret mission there. He could never tell anyone what his mission was, and I said, ‘Well, Willie, it’s way past that time.’ He said, ‘Well, I guess I can tell you. They were building secret bunkers and tunnels. The island was just a big flat stone, and they were building storage units and what have you.’ That gash on his head—he fell out of his bed. They try to find places to sleep that are not easily accessible by other people—it’s their castle, their den. He had to do some climbing and navigating to get up under this particular bridge, lost balance, and fell down and almost drowned after he hit this rock down on the edge of the river.”
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Damon, National Guard, 1981, Photographed July 6, 2012, Indianapolis
“This is my favorite picture. He was a very quiet, pensive, thoughtful man."
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Barbara, U.S. Air Force, Photographed July 6, 2012, Indianapolis
“Women are hard to find; they’re more sheltered. Women do a lot of couch surfing—people take them into their homes, and they sleep on the couch, then move to another home and sleep on another couch. And the agencies out there are pretty protective of them. She was just the sweetest lady, but nervous [about having her photo taken]. She was married to an Army guy, and they traveled around a lot. She was an operator, with those old plug-in lines. She was stationed in Portugal. And then when she got out, she traveled with her husband. She was such a dear person.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Ralph, U.S. Army, Photographed February 23, 2013, Titusville, Florida
“Ralph wasn’t doing so good when I last heard. His health was failing. His MOS [military occupation status] was running the operating room in a MASH [mobile army surgical hospital] unit. He lives in an abandoned trailer with a friend of his. It’s a place where apparently a lot of people like to congregate. He was an open guy, a neat guy. It was Ralph and his bunkmate and a third guy, who was rocked on something. His eyes were bigger than quarters, he was insane, and he kept trying to cause a disturbance. This guy slunk off while we were taking pictures, set a rug on fire, and put it under our SUV. We went to leave, went over to the guy, and I said, ‘I wish you well,’ and he was kind of surprised, and said, ‘Wow, I thought I was going to be disrespected.’ But he didn’t bother to tell me he’d put that rug under our SUV. And when we turned the corner, we saw smoke coming out of the car, and I thought, ‘That’s weird, the car’s not even on.’ We got there just in time—it was right under the gas tank. We were able to pull it out before it blew.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Lyov, U.S. Army, Photographed March 23, 2012, Kirkwood
“Lyov has become a friend. He’s 82 years old—our oldest subject. I probably know more about Lyov than anybody, because we do visit frequently. He’s a very talented man. He’s a master chess player—he goes to tournaments and gives some chess lessons to young kids in the Kirkwood area. He’s a very literate person—‘Lyov’ is a pseudonym from Russian literature. I meet him out every once in a while, and he’ll be in a booth at Burger King, practicing with his portable chess set. He rides a bike everywhere in Kirkwood and sleeps in the gazebos. I asked him how he survived last winter—I’m not a big sissy, but I wouldn’t want to be out there. He convinced me that he had a teacher who taught him how to deal with the extremes of things, that it’s a whole mental thing.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
“Butch,” U.S. Army, Photographed April 16, 2013, D.C.
“Everyone says this one looks like I shot it in a studio, but this was D.C., and we were making the most out of a bad lighting situation—it was high noon. It was flat and really hot. So we used a flash and reflector. This guy wasn’t as nice as the rest of the guys there. We asked him what his MOS [military occupational specialty] was, and he said, well, he was a cook. I said, ‘Were you a good cook?’ He said, ‘No, I was a terrible cook. So they threw me out and made me a drill sergeant.’ I could see him being one mean-ass drill sergeant.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Urns Containing the Ashes of Homeless Veterans, Community for Creative Non-Violence, April 2013, D.C.
“This is from the country’s largest homeless shelter. They bring in homeless veterans that die on the street and cremate them. Probably the family or somebody donated these urns, because the rest of them were just in clear plastic boxes.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Pete, US Marines and US Army, 4 and 6 years. Photographed in Chicago, Illinois, December 15, 2012
“Here, it's a cold, ugly day in Chicago. He was in the Marines and the Army, a silver star, a bronze star. Four purple hearts. Severe PTSD…and he had traumatic brain injury too.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Walter, Army 71-79 Combat Engineer, Sargent E-5. Photographed February 14, 2013, Nashville, Tennessee
“He was in the Army about the same time I was—’68, ’70. He was a combat engineer; that's what my original training was. He wasn't very talkative. We discussed that what engineers and infantrymen had in common was shovel.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
Joseph, Navy, Photographed at Fort Pierce, Florida, February 28, 2012
“He was recently released from the Navy. He wanted to go into Iraq and Afghanistan, but they wouldn’t let him go, and he was caught in the quagmire of paperwork. He went home to live with his family, and his family wanted nothing to do with him, and the VA couldn’t find his paperwork.”
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Photograph by Jerry Tovo
James, 74 years old; AF Air Sea rescue, 13-year career ended when his wife died; photographed in Washington D.C., April 2013
“James was the nicest man. He had some disorder…I think it was Parkinson’s. Whatever it was, he had no control over his tongue. He spoke in a mumble. And he was a [military] lifer… his wife died, and he had to come home, attend to matters, his family…I think he was a candidate for more help than he was getting.”
A man once told Jerry Tovo: Being homeless is harder than being a Marine.
Tovo knows that all too well. The 69-year-old professional photographer, who served as a U.S. Army drill sergeant during the Vietnam War, has traveled America since 2011, taking portraits of homeless men and women who have served in all capacities and all branches of the U.S. military. The oldest subject saw action in Korea; the youngest served in Iraq. Many struggle with alcoholism or post-traumatic stress disorder. Others are dealing with depression, a drug or gambling habit, or frayed social networks—when they die on the streets, their families often never know.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that an average of 131,000 homeless veterans are on the streets each night, with millions more at risk of losing shelter, and that a full 40 percent of all homeless men are vets. Those statistics may be a wake-up call, but they can’t tell the human stories behind the numbers. That’s what Tovo seeks to do with They May Have Been Heroes.
For decades, Tovo worked as a commercial photographer, shooting glossy catalogs for Bloomingdale’s and ad campaigns for Anheuser-Busch. That was followed by a decade spent as a Kodak rep, during which he had regular contact with some of the finest photographers working today. It was during this time that he developed his signature style: black-and-white digital photography, scrutinized and massaged down to the pixel. Ironically, it’s the power of technology that’s allowed him to cultivate a style that harks back to classic 1940s and ’50s film photographers like Irving Penn. It is a stark, powerful style uniquely suited to this project, which he sees as his legacy as an artist.
“I Was a Soldier,” an exhibit of Tovo’s portraits of homeless veterans, ran at the Missouri History Museum through this past January. His photography has also been featured recently in The Huffington Post and F-Stop. He plans to travel west to take more portraits and ultimately compile this work into a fine-art photography book. For updates, visit theymayhavebeenheroes.com.
