Homeless Portraits by Philip Bloom (video)

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  Skip August 3, 2008 at 2:22 pm

  Thats a great clip… I was driving thru Ponsonby one morning (Later than normal) and the scene that struck me was the numerous homeless people making their way down the street. At that point i thought.. How different the street is when the “Beautiful People” are gone.. I guess we always look at life in terms of our own position in society. Its all too often we forget that there is a large homeless community under our very noses.

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  admin August 3, 2008 at 2:31 pm

  Great observation, Skip.

  It’s for that very reason that the work various city missions offer is so very important. They are often dealing with the very large groups of people we so often only see in our peripheral vision. They ‘see’ them.

  Our lack of willingness/ability to see these people often leads us to falsely reduce the size of such groups.

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  admin August 3, 2008 at 2:38 pm

  In relation to ‘seeing’ the homeless, one of the most striking moments in the clip is when the camera pans past Spud’s out of focus face and we clearly see the people passing by on either side – thus communicating how as we go about our busy lives, we often fail to see people like Spud.

  Spud is simply an out of focus obstacle along our path from A to B. The question we should all ask is, how can we better ‘see’ the homeless?

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  Philip Bloom March 15, 2009 at 9:59 pm

  I wish there was a simple answer to this question…but having spent much time with them it’s much more than us seeing them and helping them, it is convincing them to want to be helped.

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  Frank March 16, 2009 at 11:41 am

  Philip,

  Thanks for stopping by. Your video is stunning and challenging.

  You raise a very good point.

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