Homeless in America
Photographer and documenter, Tom Stone, travels the country taking photographs of homeless people. His images are haunting, yet they tell remarkable stories at the same time. His subjects vary in age, socio-economic backgrounds, and cultures. His photo essay, American Poverty, is moving on all emotional levels.
Tom Stone’s, American Poverty, is captured in black and white only. This medium portrays its subject in a defining starkness. These photos show people’s hopes, dreams, pain, anger, and the difficulty of being in poverty succinctly. The photo montage is based on 158 subjects from San Francisco. Their stories are diverse, but they all have one thing in common today, they live in poverty.
Some of his subjects are drug and alcohol addicts. His photographs show distinctly how these diseases ravage these people’s physical appearances. Tom Stone also photographs the mentally ill, and the veterans who are homeless. In interviewing these people, one can learn more about these people than just a photograph can portray. The remarkable thing about Stone’s photo essay is that mixing photographs with factual information about the subjects makes the reader feel more attached to the subjects emotionally. You can actually feel pity and sorrow for these subjects.
One learns many things from the homeless people he photographed. Not all homeless people come to this point due to the same reasons. Some are homeless because they choose the lifestyle. Other people became homeless due to a job loss. Some subjects are just kids who haven’t made their mark on society, and don’t have a family they can rely or get help from. Their stories are diverse, yet they all share one thing, poverty and homelessness.
Tom Stone, who is Harvard educated, with a degree in computer science, worked in Silicon Valley for a number of years before becoming a documentary photographer.