I was always drawn to homeless people since I was a kid. I would often ask my mother for money when ever I saw a homeless person or a Salvation Army people because I wanted to help them. Spending my infancy until the age of 8 in Korea and then moving to Guatemala made me even worse in this regard, I would ask my parents to give money to the always present pan handlers, which they rarely did. I spent my childhood and teenage years in Guatemala being close to poverty then I moved to New York to study music in college. I never noticed homeless people maybe because I wasn't paying attention until I grabbed a camera and got into street photography. That's when I discovered homeless people in New York, because I was seeing. I started to photograph them from my gut instinct, because I wanted to for no reason not knowing that it might become a project I would want to explore more deeply in the future. I would walk the streets and if I would find one of them I would ask their permission to take a photo. I even had a chat with one who told me he was a dishonorably discharged Iraq War vet who lost contact with his wife and child and who lost a friend due to a rocket hitting his friend which caused his friend to lose his legs. Then I realized the ironical nature of the city. Being the epicenter of culture and a symbol of American power, it still had so many homeless people trying to live or that have tried. I tried to capture that irony with the last photo of this series of Images "5th Ave, New York". 5th Ave, a landmark in New York, one of the greatest cities of the world with a passed out homeless man.
