“Photography is my means of expression. It embodies my beliefs and my compassion. I consider myself lucky at not having to earn a living from it as it allows me free reign to try and help others, and not the selfish needs of a client”
The above extract, from Lee Jeffries’ interview with Impose Magazine, may serve as a fine introduction to his work. It is not often that one comes across art in which aesthetic choices and technical skills are inseparable from a sense of autonomy and social consciousness. Lee Jeffries is a Manchester-based accountant who for the most part takes pictures of the homeless. One of his portraits won the 2011 Digital Camera Photographer of the Year competition, which is hardly surprising given the emotional magnitude of his work. As Paul Bignell put it in The Independent, these are not snatched shots taken from a distance, but “intimate portraits captured in uncomfortable detail, every grain of dirt, every scar laid bare.”
And yet this work is more than brilliant photography. More often than not people avert their eyes from the homeless; we all know they are there, but most of us prefer to turn a blind eye and walk on by. It is this coercive ‘invisibility’ of the homeless that these portraits avert; or, if you prefer, they negate it in terms of Theodor Adorno’s understanding of the potential of art to challenge reified consciousness. In this respect, Lee Jeffries’ work constitutes an aesthetic and emotional restoration of the position of the homeless in the public sphere. In other words, this is art that matters; and according to Lee Jeffries’ interview with Impose Magazine, this is what matters:
“If one person looks at any of my images and feels compassion, enough to maybe offer a helping hand the next time the opportunity presents itself, then the image counts”
Twitter: LJ.@Lee_Jeffries
Flickr: LJ.’s Photostream
2 comments:
The problem of the homeless is a global phenomenon. Nowadays, with the economic crisis at its peak, many people have resulted in being homeless and completely alone in a world ready to devour them and where welfare is absent. The percentages of the homeless people are in a constant rise.
As you very nicely put it, people usually avert their eyes from them and pretend the homeless are not there. But those invisible people do exist among us and they are human beings, like all the rest of us.
These portraits from Lee Jeffries, who up until now I was not aware of, depict with an accurate detail the sadness, the misery, but also the authenticity of these people. It's amazing the amount of truth and suffering those eyes transmit. Dirty and repulsive as may be for some, yet those invisible people deserve the respect from us all because, free from everything else, they live just for one basic thing: survival. And that's what makes them real fighters.
Authenticity is a good word to explain why this work is important.
And you are right to point out that the number of homeless people is constantly increasing in the context of the international economic crisis. Maybe it takes this amount of truth and suffering, as you mention, to fully bring up what is at stake in our era: the actual living conditions of real people, as opposed to sterile economic calculations.
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