If there was one thing Finbarr O’Reilly sought to emphasize when he began reporting on white poverty in South Africa, it was that color shouldn’t have a voice in the conversation.

“It doesn’t really matter what color it is,” said Mr. O’Reilly, a 39-year-old Canadian photographer for Reuters whose touching 2005 photo of a Niger mother and child was named World Press Photo of the Year. “It’s an issue that really is quite urgent right now in South Africa.”

The story has rarely been told. But it has been on his radar since a 1994 backpacking trip through Africa, when he noticed a number of poor white South Africans begging for change at traffic lights.

“I started asking around and saying, ‘What’s going on here?’” Mr. O’Reilly said over the phone from Dakar, Senegal, where he’s based. “It’s not a new phenomenon, but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past.”

Many people react with surprise when they hear the numbers associated with the poor white population. Mr. O’Reilly said there are nearly half a million white South Africans living below the poverty line, and at least 80 squatter settlements near the capital city, Pretoria.

“The common perception is that white South Africans enjoy lives of privilege and relative wealth,” Mr. O’Reilly said. He spent a week in March photographing the mostly-Afrikaner population in Coronation Park, a squatter community of about 400 in Krugersdorp, northwest of Johannesburg.

On the surface, Coronation Park is quaint, with the aura of a verdant holiday resort. On weekends, wealthy Afrikaners picnic there. But a closer look, like the one evoked through Mr. O’Reilly’s reportage, reveals scattered garbage, stray animals and children in bare feet. Small generators and open fires stand in for electricity. Alcoholism and violence abound.

Mr. O’Reilly’s goal is to refute the kinds of stereotypes typically associated with African imagery; to show not only another side of poverty, but the resilience of those who live it.

Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters

The residents of Coronation Park were at first skeptical when Mr. O’Reilly approached them. In the past, he said, the local press had depicted them very negatively.

“I was less interested in what they were saying than why they were saying it,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “All of it was aimed at not coming into a place like that with any preconceived judgment, and to try and portray the people for how they are in a dignified way.”

He spent a week in the community and ultimately gained the residents’ trust. Inside their homes — many of which are one-room shanties — Mr. O’Reilly found poignant vestiges of formerly-middle-class lives: religious icons, wall hangings, wooden spoons and Afrikaner lace doilies.

“It was little bits and pieces of former lives that no longer were,” he said. “All these individual items added up to trying to recreate in this new environment the comfortable existence that they would have had before.”

The series from Coronation Park is being shown in an Italian exhibition called “After A.” In his wider look at poverty among white South Africans, Mr. O’Reilly said, it is just the beginning.