Seeing Beyond the “Bag Lady” – The New Yorker

In 2003, the photographer Jessica Eve Rattner moved into a house in Berkeley, California, around the corner from an old woman named Lee. Lee had been a model when she was young—a shoe model for fancy department stores, primarily. “She has these teeny-tiny feet,” Rattner told me. Lee was once professionally beautiful, a person to be seen. But when Rattner met her, Lee was a person who was often overlooked—she was the neighborhood “bag lady.”