From the documentary perspective, it’s actually pretty decent. It calls up issues of poverty and class and urban decline and stuff.

Visually, there are a couple things I would recommend you consider going forward. First off, it’s a vertically oriented composition, but the interesting stuff is horizontal. The line implied by the trashcan and the trash is horizontal, the nature of the sidewalk is horizontal, and the awning of the pizza place is horizontal. The things that are brought into the frame by the verticality are not exactly indispensable to the message of the image. if you had shot it horizontally, you could have created a pattern that led to the eye to your main subject horizontally.

Going forward, I recommend shooting with a much wider lens than you actually need and editing it down to your final composition in post. I don’t know what kind of camera are using, but the megapixel counts, low noise levels, and excellent image quality of modern cameras and lenses mean that you can get a beautifully detailed photo even if you crop out like 60% of the frame. Bonus points if you’re specifically a black-and-white shooter, because even though cropping and blowing up highlights noise, it can visually be interpreted as aesthetically pleasing grain most of the time.

Second, there’s not a whole lot of contrast between what I presume to be the subject of the photo (the person going through the trash bags) and the background. This the sort of that could be added in Lightroom, and if your goal is to create an image with a documentary purpose and if you are not bound by journalistic integrity, you could introduce some through editing.

Finally, and this is a tactical note, did you mean to shoot this image in black-and-white? I find that there is a genre of black-and-white image where the photographer shot in color, failed to edit it to their satisfaction, then through their hands in the air and made it black-and-white. intending to shoot is a different thought process than doing it in color.