Best Coffee Shop Art Project

Last winter, the Broadway Café and Westport Coffee House displayed a photo exhibit called Can You Spare a Look? All of its photographs were taken by homeless people. Kansas City Art Institute seniors Dylan Mortimer and Hayes Ford wanted to deal with homelessness in a photojournalistic way without falling into clichés. So instead of taking superficial photographs of people holding cardboard signs and sleeping on benches, the artists brought disposable cameras to a homeless shelter and gave them away, letting their subjects portray the world from their own points of view. One man used up the film taking pictures of the sky from the corner where he always sat. Another took fun, sentimental pictures of his friends, including one called "Red" giving the camera the finger. Another took well-framed pictures of sunsets. That the photographs were displayed in Westport during the holiday season had a sobering effect on shoppers who stopped for a mocha or to get out of the cold.