Give a Man a Camera...

    When I first saw this story about a guy who gave a homeless kid a camera, I thought, "well, those pictures are going to suck."

    As it stands, I was not just wrong, I was happily wrong.  Not only are some of these pictures amazing, the story behind how they came to be is equally impressive.

"A few years ago, I gave a camera and some film to a homeless kid I had befriended while visiting some family in San Luis Obispo CA. He had been thrown out of his parents house for drugs a month ago, and been crashing with friends, generally bumming around the central coast since then. After giving him a brief lesson in the use of a manual camera (it was this beat up old Fujica 35mm), I asked him to shoot all the film, then mail it back to me. In exchange, I'd let him keep the camera. I didn't expect to hear from him again, but the kid seemed interested in photography, and he didn't have much else going for him, so I gave him the camera and the film.

A few months ago, I received a large envelope filled with photos in the mail from the kid, along with a brief letter describing what he had been doing since I last saw him. There were about a hundred photos, mostly horribly under or over exposed pictures of people sitting around, but here are the more interesting ones."

    There is just something so remarkably human about this story.  And, there's really not much I can say since the pictures not only tell a story, but they show considerable promise and talent. 

    I hope you enjoy.

(via Metafilter)

-DP

Tags: Metafilter, Photography, Homeless