Yes, a heartwarming tale of a kid losing his shit cos he didn’t get a copy of ‘MYLDN, a streetview of London Life’ which many, if not everyone, ever, has said could just be the perfect xmas gift™
50% all of all my proceeds will go towards youth homeless charity Centrepoint. If you want to give directly to them here is link to their website. You can sponsor a room for just £12 a month or 40p a day and you can keep a young person off the streets.
The homeless situation I saw in both Los Angeles and San Francisco was pretty dire. In L.A entire blocks located downtown have become tent towns, home to those who don’t have one. Its a grim sight to see, and the scale of the problem is quite staggering. It looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi like “Escape from New York”. What is even more painful is that apparently Californians voted to add a small per cent of their tax dollar specifically to raise money to combat the ever-increasing homelessness but it is very evident that money has yet to be allocated as nothing has improved.
In San Francisco, it is equally as bad. Like in L.A they have all been moved to one area (the Tenderloin in their case) so they can be kept out of sight to the majority of residents. In London, we have a possibly an equally bad problem but it is maybe not as noticeable as they are scattered everywhere rather than in just one district. The other difference is, in London, you do see a lot of compassion and sympathy towards the homeless. Over there, from what I saw of the people who passed them, they not only ignored them but they also seem afraid of them. This is not to say the Californians don’t care for them, they do, as cleary shown in their decision to vote for greater funding to tackle the problem, but the treatment of them on the street is different to here.
One night we were in San Francisco, having a smoke outside our hotel which was right on the edge of a block chock full of homeless and a guy came up to us and asked for some money and we gave him a few dollars and he was so touched he walked off and then came back to express his gratitude, not just because we have given him something but because we had treated him like a human being. He told us he had come to San Fran to get work, ran out of money and him and his family, who were also living with him on the street in a tent had got stuck there and were now trapped. He was the sweetest guy and it broke our hearts to speak to him. What we must endeavour to do is remind these people, who have fallen on hard times, that it is not their failure, it is society’s. It is us who have failed them, not the other way round.
A short while after this, another woman came up to us (pictured below) and she sung us an incredible rendition of a soul track and she poured all her emotion into it and it was truly beautiful. And then my friend Phil, hugged her like she was family and that was also truly beautiful.
We must never forget that no-0ne is born homeless. Every person you see on the street could be any of us who have just had a really really shit run of luck.
Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
The photograph above says it all. A homeless man sleeps outside the showroom of a luxury block of flats in Camden. It feels like the last defiant gesture of someone who has had everything else stripped away.
You don’t need to read the stats to know homelessness has increased, you can see it with your own eyes. And when you do read the stats you wonder quite how it could have got so much worse so quickly. Its up 657% in the borough of Camden alone where this picture was taken and up over 169% across the country since 2010. So much of it is to with the appalling mismanagement of universal credit and the change in housing benefit payments which use to go to the landlord and now go to the claimant, both of which have caused people to fall into arrears and be consequently evicted where they wouldn’t have been before. Add in austerity cuts to welfare and mental health services and there are now tons more people on the street that previously would have had accommodation.
This rise in street sleepers across the country has been documented in the media at the same time when they have just revealed that half of the luxury flats built in last ten years are vacant and will most likely remain so. That is in addition to the 75,000 odd buildings in London that are already empty. They changed the law to remove squatters rights but maybe its time to reinstate them because this situation is beyond broken and we need to create immediate solutions as well as long term ones.
We are now really starting to see the cost of the draconian cuts that have been implemented by the tories for a decade plus and they have all resulted in creating crisis in all the services that have been stripped bare. The tragic thing is that none of these cuts has resulted in any significant drop in the deficit and the money that will be now be spent dealing with the fall out will undoubtedly be far greater than anything they saved by underfunding it in the first place.
It is painful to see in a city that has so much wealth and such a disparity of it. And its friggin freezing out there at the moment. The worst thing is you are getting asked for money at every turn in london it is so difficult to work out who really needs and who doesn’t. Even when you do give them a pound or whatever you can you wonder how on earth can that help them? A bit of coinage will not solve this problem. It requires a government who is serious about tackling the causes that got them on the street in the first place, namely their own policies. Until they own up to that and abandon them or at least acknowledge the pitfalls and find ways to stop people falling through the cracks there is no forward.
I have not really photographed anyone living on the streets for a few years as came to the conclusion there possibly an element of ‘poverty porn’ associated with street photography which focussed on the homeless. You might be wanting to highlight their plight but if you do nothing with those photographs other than post them you are in some ways draining the emotional content of your subject’s lives for the benefit of your feed. If it doesn’t change anything why continue to do it? How does it help? And yet, the problem does need highlighting and cannot be ignored so am not digging at anyone who is trying. There is however a balance between observation, exploitation and voyeurism that it is often an impossible tight rope to tread. As a documentarian there is no guidebook, you must just follow your own instincts and try to walk the thin line as best you can. It is for this reason I personally have chosen to keep the people predominantly absent from these pictures. And also to highlight how they are often invisible to so many who pass them…
