Structure Out of Chaos: Shantytowns of America's Homeless

Structure Out of Chaos: Shantytowns of America's Homeless, is a documentary of homeless people who organize their lives by building shantytown communities. This project has been a rollercoaster ride of watching people get organize until a task force comes along to sweep them away. The process of closing down encampments is indeed even called a “sweep.” Often shelter and services are offered but the residents don’t want to submit their freedom to an institution. People become chronically homeless when they lose the ability to conform to social norms and structure. There is a catch twenty-two in the current solutions. Outreach teams want homeless people to enter programs full of rules, regulations and structure. If they were capable of conforming to structure they would not be homeless in the first place. The cycle of building villages and having them swept away repeats over and over again. The homeless people get disempowered and disorganized every time the get disbanded. Throughout the push pull a permanent solution never arrives and the issue just moves from place to place. A strange thing does happen when they are left alone. They get organized. They form leaders and chase off the characters that cause trouble. They take care of the weakest members of the group. Out of the chaos some order is indeed created but the level it reaches varies with every community. The documentary began in 1993 when the City of Miami was being sued in Federal Court for arresting homeless people prior to public events. The judge ruled, “safe zones' must be established and that people must be allowed to eat, sleep, and bath in public without fear of arrest until suitable social services could be offered.” As a result, homeless encampments sprung up in Miami and across the country. Since then the encampments are endlessly popping up and getting swept away. Structure out of Chaos is a story communicated through portraiture. The goal is have the viewer connect and identify with individuals in their private homes. The viewer is well aware that the photographer was granted permission to create the images. Squatters that organize communities do not always fit the typical stereotypes of homelessness. They bath, wear clean clothes, often work jobs, have bank accounts, and may not look different from a middle class Americans. Many of them wash their sheets, pick up their trash and have a system for disposal of human waste. When the project began most villages were made of plywood and photographs were made on B&W film. Over time equipment has evolved and technical possibilities have shifted. In recent years the work is done in color with a digital camera and battery operated studio lights. The camps have also evolved and now include tent cities. The story includes Miami, Florida’s Bookville in 2010. Bookville was a camp of Sex Offenders in South Florida created by a board member of the Homeless Trust named Ron Book. It is strange that an organization set up to disperse funds for homeless programs ended up being responsible for creating a camp of unwilling residents wearing leg monitors. Failure to check in each night would result in a parole violation and they would get sent back to prison. This twenty-three year long documentary is a voyage of watching homeless people organize themselves with what ever then could scrounge. The images are not about homelessness in general, but specifically about homeless people setting up structured living solutions to solve the problems they face as a community. In spite of all the programs and services offered, the homeless population continues to grow and the issues expand. The mission of this work is to make the invisible population visible. The desire is to inspire informed discourse and possibly a social shift in consciousness.