Tapestry of Space: Domestic Architecture and Underground Communities in Margaret Morton’s Photography of a Forgotten New York written by Irina Nessarova from Illinois State University is a secondary source accounting on Margaret Morton’s works: The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City and Fragile Dwelling, both of which capture and explore the realities of homelessness in the United States inner city, specifically New York.

Nessarova explains how “homelessness” as we know it is not truly the “absence of a home” but in actuality “the absence of a stable home.” This distinction is key because homemaking is a huge part of the human identity, and because of this homeless are as much apart of homemaking as those who live in an apartment, condo or even a mansion. Homeless people build/make homes out of the discarded materials and the abandoned places where other members of society are not. This is a prime example of the homeless identity. However because of restrictive laws about homelessness in the inner cities of New York (such as closing off the tunnels in which many homeless New Yorkers sought shelter as captured by Morton) society is further perpetuating its fear of poverty and taking away a crucial part of the human identity (dehumanizing) from the homeless: a solid, identifiable, stable home.

In exploration of Margaret Morton’s means of conveying the dehumanization and realities of homelessness in inner city New York, one has to consider the reality of humanity at the time. While Morton was a derive artist, meaning she set out with a purpose when she captured her art and told the stories of those homeless on the streets of New York, she set out to show the realities of homelessness- an ugly an widely ignored issue- in a world where mass media reigned over what people saw and accepted. Morton sought to use her work as an anti-capitalist backdrop to show the people what they refused to see. As an international situationist using derive form of “understanding the environments psychological impact” Morton was able to see directly how the environment affected her even as someone merely passing through it and attempting to capture its truth. This along with interviewing the members of the communities themselves really cemented her ability to accurately convey the effects of the environment on the daily civilian. Another form of capturing the environment around oneself is flaneur where one loses themselves in the environment that they are observing. This form of field work is very hard to do, but this allows one to not put themselves in the shoes of the homeless who live the tunnels and shanty towns of inner city New York City, but simply capture the picturesque qualities of that reality.