Eyes in the eyes with homeless
They are ones we do not look at. Those not talked about. Those who are sometimes offered a piece, or their embarrassed smile, and which one quickly forgets.
This time, however, the thing is not so obvious. These abyss of life face us in frontal framing. No escape: in front of a photograph, one does not evade the gaze of the one who fixes the objective - one does not circumvent it, one takes it full force. With the images of Lee Jeffries, it's even worse: we undergo an electroshock. Once, twice, three times, and so on up to 35, the number of shots in the series. The time our hearts restart.
"The emotion is in the eyes," says the English photographer. "Where do you look at me? In the eyes," he insists, as if to underline the obvious. Sitting next to his large-format prints. It's been five years since this globe-trotter walked in the great western cities, from Rome to Los Angeles, to meet the inhabitants of the street. The starting point of the trip is in London. Jeffries, come to cover the marathon, discovers a young homeless on a sidewalk. She is huddled in a sleeping bag, he can not help but photograph her. While his subject gets angry, the photographer hesitates on the way forward. No doubt it would be well to leave. No ! He crosses the street and speaks to her. This encounter sealed his destiny as a humanist photographer.
"The final image is the symbol of an encounter, usually lasting several hours, but not its primary reason. What is important to me is to establish an emotional connection," explains this affable man. "Maybe I saw in those abandoned the magnifying mirror of my own solitude, at a certain period of my life." Lee Jeffries has never been homeless, but sometimes it does not matter much, he said. "A divorce can lead someone to the streets."
These noble and contrasted monochromes, he realizes them in natural light, aided only by a reflector that one sees, when one looks closely, in the pupil of his models.
His Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/LeeJeffriesphotographer/?fref=ts
His 500px : http://leejeffries.500px.com/
