While attending Art Center I took part in a course that was linked to the United Nations through the school’s program named DesignMatters. The course involved working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were involved in some way with achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. A variety of organizations came to the school to talk about the work that they were doing, how it related to the MDGs and the kind of projects they imagined us creating with/for them.

During the second week of the class another completely unrelated group of students were folding into our class, and that still left only 12 students—and for some reason—4 instructors. All of us, both those enrolled intentionally and unintentionally were then to pick a specific organization to work with.

We could work with Surfrider Foundation, Planned Parenthood and a few other national and local orgs. I went back and forth for a while, considering for whom my work might be best suited. Originally I considered Planned Parenthood, which in a sense would be at the root of the solution to most of the problems put forth by the MDGs (which include eradicated poverty and hunger, improving maternal health and reducing child mortality). It turned out that logistically I wasn’t going to be able to work with them, so I turned to PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) in Los Angeles—mainly because they are supported by both Annette Bening and Rhonda Flemming.

At first I was reluctant to work with a homeless organization because there is no shortage of photographers who are interested in doing a cliché turning of their lens towards the less fortunate. However, after meeting with some of the staff at PATH (their offices are lined with shallow dof photographs of homeless people) I learned a few things that changed my perception of the homeless situation in Los Angeles. The most important revelation being the fact that the highway off-ramp panhandling types only make up about 10% of the 90k+ homeless pop. in LA. This suggested that, well, the problem is bigger than what we see and more importantly we really have no idea what a “homeless life” is really like.

To that end I worked on a project where I provided point and shoot cameras to some of the temporary residents of PATH to show what it was like for the other 90%. I would not claim this to be a brilliant new paradigm in photojournalism, as it has been done many times before (and managed and executed with much more success), but it was worth a whirl. For fear of failure of that project I also worked on something on the side—a project called Disappear Here.

The idea behind the project was to peel back just a single layer, instead of going right to the source like I attempted with the initial project. I simply just began to photograph all of the specific places that I had seen a homeless person occupying. Sometimes the locations had traces of a human’s presence from apple cores to clothing to shit. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, there were no rules to selecting a space, I just made the photographs of where someone had been. I don’t mean that to be as overwrought as it sounds. Simply put, I saw the next layer beyond the people to be the place.

By focusing on those specific locations I had known to have been occupied, it forced me to look at those places as something more than a random corner or a square meter of sidewalk.