Tales of Endurance: Stories from New York City’s Homeless

The first interview I got was with a man named John from New Jersey. He has been homeless in New York for several years but his experiance is very different compared to the experiances of Scott. His story is one based more around substance abuse and jail and how these elements shaped his life and left him where he is now.Click here to listen to the rest of the audio I recorded with John, as he talks about why living homeless in new York is different than anywhere else as well as his take on the various institutions and forms of help offered around the city

The second video recording I did involves the ways in which people can give to the homeless. This particular method involves a donation jug. There is a man who works for a homeless shelter who asks people as they walk by if they could spare anything for the homeless, and he is only saying spare change. I just wanted to set up a still camera with the focus being the just and see the interaction with and around it. What completely surprised me about this footage was not the fact that only two individuals in four minutes donated, but rather how the hundreds of shoppers in Union Square completely ignored the table and jug. It is hard to see this video and notice anyone even acknowledge that it is there. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the message of this situation. Were people concerned with where the money was actually going to and was this the reason to not throw any change in? Or is there a bigger problem where people could care less who or what the recipient was, person or jug, they still wouldn’t give.

As I pursue project further and further, there is so much I am learning about the homeless population within New York City. I find myself always coming back to the Union Square area to find people to interview. I am going up to the people with the signs as they seem to be more willing to speak with me. However, I did start searching for possible people to talk to at Times Square. Commercial Spaces almost never seem to have any homeless, meaning direct proximity of storefronts, so I began to walk between avenues. What I have been paying more attention to are the “homeless spaces” that are created in various alleys and street corners. One homeless man had a collection of various materials that he had gathered and that travel along with him. There was a good ten to fifteen feet of space that appeared as if he had created a private property to himself where the boundaries were defined through the spread of his belongings. I began to realize, homeless or not, that the idea of property and estate always seem to come together and define the lives of people, whether it be a building or a collection of garbage bags.

It was my goal to talk to one of the younger homeless in New York City and to get a feel for how to record and what sort of questions I could ask that might be interesting to those who would watch this footage. My interview with Adam was short but informative.

The next interview I shot was with a man named Scott. This interview to me was particularly interesting as he had been a photographer for several years but experienced several crises which lead to his homelessness. He had experianced the highs and lows of society in a matter of months.

I have also posted the rest of the audio from the interview with Scott at this link:

Click here for the rest of the interview!

The rest of what he told me after the camera battery died is really interesting as well.

So I thought I would just talk about my findings and interviews on the first day I went out to shoot some videos. I decided to start out around the Union Square area on sunday afternoon. As I walked around the area of the park I noticed that most of the homeless were in or around the Starbuck’s between 14th and 15th street. I went around asking various homeless if they would be willing to tell me a little bit about themselves, where they were from, and how they found themselves in New York. Most of the people I had talked to were either not interested or were too ill to respond to the question. One man I encountered I asked if he would tell me a little bit about how he became homeless and responded by saying “I wish I could tell you, but there are things I can’t even talk about that lead me here.” I then asked if he could tell me a little bit about his life before he became homeless, his childhood, so forth. His response was “it was good…my homelessness had nothing to do with that.” I then walked down Broadway and came across another homeless man. I asked him the same series of questions. He laughed and simply said “I have a stomach ulcer.”

After about two and a half hours of looking around and asking, I had gotten nowhere and was beginning to question myself and the project. I did however discover that there are two specific types of homeless. There were those I first attempted to interview, so ill that few other than other homeless can communicate with them coherently and understand them. They have become so seperated from society that they didn’t even know how to converse with someone like me. I held a dollar in from of a man’s face for about ten seconds before he acknowledged the fact i was giving him money. However, there is another type that were depressed however willing to talk about themselves and there experiences. This group of homeless included individual’s like Adam (pictured left) and Scott (pictured right).