Portland, Oregon, United States - When Marge Pettitt's seven-year-old daughter broke down in tears in a homeless shelter in 2009, she made one of the hardest decisions of her life: Sending the child to live with her father, who had married another woman and moved into her apartment.
Marge, a 59-year-old with short greying hair and tobacco-stained fingers, found herself living on the streets after a difficult divorce 14 years ago. That year, she gave birth to her daughter, leaving the hospital and moving from one temporary homeless shelter to another before ending up back on the streets.
"I haven't seen her in four years," she says as she rolls a cigarette on a picnic table in Hazelnut Grove, a community for homeless people that is at risk of eviction.
Switching between English and Spanish, Marge, who is of Mexican-American descent, navigates memories of police harassment, sexual violence, humiliation and hunger. "They turn us [women] into men for a while," she says casually. "You come in innocent and you end up tough."
She is among the 564,708 people who are homeless in the United States, according to 2015 estimates by the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Of that total, at least 15 percent are classified as "chronically homeless" because they have lived on the streets for a year or more.
Although many working-class people who live from pay cheque to pay cheque may be at risk of losing their homes, already marginalised groups - communities of colour, women, the disabled, indigenous people, LGBT people, runaway children and orphans - are particularly vulnerable.
Portland is one of many cities across the US grappling with a growing - and increasingly visible - homeless population.
As Americans prepare to head to the polls on November 8 to decide between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump, many homeless political organisers argue that neither candidate will address their needs.
"Poor people and homeless people - but especially homeless people - are the hugest untapped potential voter pool out there," says Alley Valkyrie, a Portland-based homeless rights activist.
"Homeless people could throw any election if you could create a block out of them. But there are so many barriers, and homeless folk often tend to be the most anti-government because they've been screwed over so much."
'Anxiety and depression'
Marge has camped with her partner Abel for the past few years. They spend their days walking from one tent city for the homeless to the next or attempting to secure a meal or a bed in a shelter for the night. Some of the homeless camps have dozens of tents, others are just a handful of people in sleeping bags. All risk being kicked off the land by property owners or run out of public spaces by the police.
The couple say they endure repeated harassment by police and city authorities and recall how a park ranger threatened to have them and a pair of homeless girls also camping nearby arrested last month. "He drove up and told us … we need to respect nature," Marge says. "I asked him what he would do if it was his daughter out here - there were two young 19-year-old girls. He told me, 'My daughter is better than that.'"
But even worse than that, Marge explains, are the police sweeps - raids on encampments when tents and belongings are often confiscated - and the heavy rains. Without a tarpaulin or tent, illness is guaranteed, while the loss of family memorabilia takes a different toll, sometimes exacerbating the depression and mental illness that often afflicts members of the homeless community.
"Oh my God, the anxiety and depression that hit me when I [first] lost all my material possessions because it got left in the rain - that was horrible," she says. Those ruined photos and belongings were Marge's last connection to her past life.
Years spent living on the streets have left her with a list of tickets and citations for violations such as loitering and camping in areas where it is forbidden.
In cities across the country, a series of laws that ban sleeping outside, camping in public places, begging and sitting or sleeping on sidewalks, among other things, target the homeless.
'Going through garbage cans'
Mike Summers is 53 and first became homeless nearly three years ago after a series of personal tragedies. In 2012, he was laid off from his job at an aluminum factory, where he had worked for 15 years, and became dependent on unemployment benefits. After his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer months later and became bed-ridden, he spent two years caring for her. Within a month of her death, the bank took his home because he could no longer afford his mortgage payments.
No longer eligible for unemployment cheques, and with no savings left and no work prospects, he couldn't afford an apartment and affordable housing wasn't an option because, he says, "I've seen waiting lists that are 10 years long".
Mike is a tall, heavy set man with a grey beard flecked with blond. He complains that neither Trump nor Clinton has put forward any meaningful proposals to combat homelessness.
"No one really cares [about the homeless]," he says, lighting a cigarette and folding the 'Help Wanted' page of the Portland Tribune daily newspaper.
He spends most of his days scouring through job advertisements and making cold calls to local businesses. But with a criminal record featuring a list of charges accumulated while living on the streets, he is automatically disqualified from jobs that require background checks.
"Is it humane to see people in doorways sleeping with no cover over them when it's raining? Is it humane to see people going through garbage cans to get their next meal? If that's humane, I have a warped sense of what that word means," he says.
For Mike though, the hardest part of living on the streets isn't the bone-chilling winters or the rain. "In the street, you have to be able to sleep with one eye open and one eye closed," he says. "You have to watch your stuff [or] look out for your girlfriend if you have one."
Between 1999 and 2015, the National Coalition for the Homeless recorded 1,657 acts of violence against homeless people. Of that, 428 were fatal.
Tired of the constant threat of violence and seeking a solid night's sleep, Mike eventually came to Right to Dream Too - known to locals as R2D2 - one of several camps in the city organised and operated according to democratic principles by homeless people.
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