Gallery
In late1997,
I was awarded a contract to produce a multi-image slide presentation for the
City of West Lafayette, Indiana. The assignment involved producing a program
that could be used to define and illustrate the problem of homelessness in this
medium-sized, Midwestern city and to describe the services in the community
providing assistance to homeless individuals, families and children. The sister
cities of Lafayette and West Lafayette Indiana had undertaken an aggressive
set of projects to not only serve the homeless populations' immediate needs
of food and shelter, but to also help the homeless find a pathway out of poverty
and dependency in the Tippecanoe County area.
The project involved writing, photographing and producing the slide show and providing a series of gallery quality black and white photographs that could be displayed for the public as part of an information and awareness campaign. My goal as photographer and producer was to pursue the assignment in a way that was different from the often stereotypical approach used for documenting elements of the human condition. Instead of focusing on the results of being homeless, such as digging in garbage cans and panhandling passersby on the streets, I worked to study the homeless with my camera as fellow humans caught in a difficult struggle.
My primary approach was to spend time with the homeless in their environments, try to get to know them and earn their trust and respect before pointing my camera at them. Once I had permission to take their photographs, I focused on shooting portraits and other photographs that I felt illustrated their daily lives and their emotional responses to their situation. In addition, I also conducted a series of audio interviews where they described their situation, how they got there and what their hopes were for the future.
All photographs were shot with either a Nikon N90 or a Nikon F3 using various focal length lenses. I used Fuji Velvia and Provia 100 and 400 ISO films for the color photographs and primarily Kodak T-max 100 and 400 ISO for the black and white photographs. The black and white images were custom printed on Ilford and Kodak fiber-based papers.
The title of the slide program is "Voices from the Street." The image above was produced using Adobe Photoshop and includes four of the homeless individuals photographed for the project over a backdrop including the Tippecanoe County courthouse located in Lafayette, IN and the American flag.