Understanding who they are

We do a lot of projecting of our beliefs on people in this world to form judgments. Many times our beliefs are not based on real facts but on emotional reactions to our own projections.

As soon as the word “homeless” is used a visual image is conjured based on each individuals life experience. For example, a common projection is that a homeless person is a dirty bearded man in tattered soiled clothes holding a bottle covered by a brown paper bag. The man will be sleeping in a public space being ignored as people walk by. How sad indeed.

But the reality of people technically homeless covers a spectrum of faces and they will not all fit into the mold of what society wants to project. To be specific, the real face of homelessness in this country includes children who still attend school and common folks who are just down on their luck. 

Even if we separate the chronically homeless from those who are homeless due to economic hardship you would still be shocked by what you discover. Many of the people I photographed bathed once or twice a day.  Encampment residents owned wardrobes and washed laundry regularly. People cleaned and decorated their living spaces. They washed their sheets and made their beds. One camp in particular had a service van pick residents up for temp jobs and these workers had bank accounts.

If you look at the photographs in this series out of context you would most likely not identify anyone as being homeless based on common projections. To put it simply, our stereotypes of what we think we know about homelessness may not actually align with reality.

My personal conclusion from this experience is that people are the same at all segments of society.  Some of them you will love and some of them you may not care much for and the quality of an individual is not linked to what they own.