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.