Lee Jeffries - Homeless Portraits, 164 HQ Images!

164 HQ Images | up to 6144x4096 px | 329 MB

When you walk the streets of your city, do you notice homeless people? How often do you take a moment of your time and give them some change your pockets hold? And even when you do that, do you look them in the eyes, do you wonder who they are, how did they end up living in the streets? What is their story? Lee Jeffries, a self-taught British photographer, has taken upon himself to tell the rest of us who the homeless really are. Through a life-changing event that included taking a photograph of a young girl huddled in her sleeping bag, she noticing him, and he apologizing to her, talking and getting to know her, we now have an opportunity to finally break the misconceptions we’ve had about the people living in the streets and see them for who they truly are – the human beings, and not some boogeyman we’ve grown to be afraid of.

I’ve talked about intimacy, and that just may be the most important feature of Lee’s work. It started with him going to London to run the half-marathon, and the day before, as he was walking the streets, he noticed a girl sleeping in her bag. He ‘stole’ a picture before she noticed him and made a big fuss about it, at which point, he walked away. But, as with all the great stories, the big moment happened. He decided to turn back and apologize to the girl. The subsequent talk they had and the photographs he took after that changed his life and pointed his career towards the homeless people. Since then, he first approached every single person he’s photographed and talked to them. In that talk, he always manages to capture their essence, even before taking their picture. By looking in their eyes, he simply feels he’s found the person he wants to make a connection with. It was never about photography, but rather about forming the relationships with the people. Lee sees that moment of recognition in the stranger’s eyes and believes he’s accepted by them because they see the identical emotion in him.

You may have noticed we haven’t talked about Lee’s process, about what he does after the image has been taken, and that’s for a reason. The artist doesn’t like to talk about it since he considers that shifts the attention from what truly matters, and that is people in the photographs. It is amazing that all of this has been done by a self-taught artist and the one who works a full-time job as an accountant. This tale of his started as self-funded quest to raise awareness and the level of donations to the homeless people, but also to show the general population that there is absolutely no reason to be afraid of the people living in the streets, and that they all have their own stories to tell, but only if you are brave enough to look into their eyes and talk to them.