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

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).