Photographs by a Homeless Child

I must get over my aversion to Something Awful (which Eliza has long sworn is one of the Internet's truly great bastions of fringe art, although I've always had a hard time getting past the all-caps "so ugly my eyeballs exploded like the Death Star jokes" that have been a main-stay of the front page for the last five years) to post this beautifully moving story about a homeless kid and a beat-up Fujica camera in their forums.

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.

Amazingly, the kid mailed them back. The results are a strange hodge-podge of the innocent joys of childhood mixed with the depressing squalor of poverty: a photograph of a kid riding a unicycle juxtaposed with a sewer tunnel filled with refuse and animal bones.

I'm not entirely sure I believe the story (the photographs at times seem too picturesque) but if it's true, it's a powerful statement about the beauty that lies within the children who get lost between the cracks.

I gave a homeless kid a camera [Something Awful Forums]