The Unwanted: Thilde Jensen's portrait of homelessness in America

New York-based Thilde Jensen talks to us about her current project The Unwanted , a portrait of homelessness in America. For over a year the Danish photographer has been documenting the lives of the people who live on the streets of Syracuse. The project is ongoing and Thilde plans to visit other towns and cities in the US this year. In 2013 her photo essay The Canaries that captured the lives of people affected by a condition called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity was purchased by MoMA for its permanent collection. Below, she tells us about the idea behind The Unwanted and her wider work.

“The project grew out of my previous project The human…a self image about a small impoverished American town. One day while out photographing I came across a traveling homeless man sitting under the highway. Later when I did a little research I was surprised to find that Syracuse, the city closest to where I live, had a fairly large homeless population and even some people surviving outside year round. Syracuse is well known for its brutal winters. I had long been concerned about the social cost of the American capitalistic system valuing profit over human welfare. Homelessness seemed to be a very tangible consequence of the growing divide between rich and poor in America. But what really caught and has sustained my interest is the complexity of this story.

We see the homeless with their signs for help and are reminded of the abyss that awaits us if we were to slip and fall. Who are these people and what brought them here?

Some take to the street in their teens escaping the dysfunction and abuse of broken homes. Others are hard working men and women for whom a death of their loved ones, divorce, illness or job loss has caused their lives to fall apart. There are many war veterans suffering from PTSD, ex-inmates with no place to go, the mentally ill and a growing number of people living in poverty in areas where housing cost has reached such highs that a minimum wage job could never hope to pay the actual cost of living. For many long-term homeless drugs and alcohol have become the escape, what keeps them going in a constant hustle for money to dull the pain of being alive.

From the start I knew that I wasn’t interested in taking the “traditional” outsider portrait of the homeless I wanted to get in close and follow a few people over time. I meet people in the street or where they sleep under bridges or abandoned buildings. I know how to spot people who are homeless and the majority of people walking the streets of downtown Syracuse when it gets cold out are homeless. I also realised early on that if I wanted to capture the restless energy of life in the street I had to forget about trying to pose a picture and just allow things to happen. So far, almost all the pictures in the project are from Syracuse, NY but I am planning to do some traveling this year to broaden the scope of the story.

When I’m photographing in the street anything goes, I try not to think too much, just feel the moment with the camera. Later when I edit my pictures I apply a much more critical approach looking for pictures that have an emotional charge but at the same time are truthful to the reality of the broader narrative of the story. To me the individual image has to be able to stand alone to be included in the project but it is as a series that the project really comes to life and becomes its own universe.

I hope that The Unwanted project will help shed some light on the many tragic destinies which are being derailed from our society. Over time I have become friends with many of the homeless and their life stories and struggles are often quite heartbreaking. It is hard not to go to bed at night feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong when some people live like dogs in the street in the richest country in the world.

I plan to continue photographing for The Unwanted project for another year and then work on putting it together as a book. A photo book can be a work of art as well as a social and historical document all at the same time. For me the book is the ultimate format for photographic story telling.

For those who are familiar with my own story and The Canaries project there are some obvious parallels. I experienced my own life suddenly falling apart due to Environmental Illness which forced me to leave everything behind to live out of a tent in the woods for many years. This makes it easy for me to empaphise with the people pushed out of our society for economic reasons. In the end it is the same human tragedy, a similar story of not fitting in, of not being loved or valued, of being invisible."