Stuart Griffiths on his homeless photographs & practice.
The homeless photographs featured here came about from my own personal experiences of being a homeless veteran. These were the photographs that got my work noticed.
In the year 2000, I arrived in London looking for work but knew no one and had nowhere to live, but had a job working as a paparazzo photographing the rich and famous. After around three months of rough sleeping, getting beds in dormitories at back packer hostels I came across a hostel in east London dedicated to people who had served in the armed forces and photographed life inside the hostel. After I got my life together I returned to the hostel to make interviews and portraits of the residents there. A difficult subject matter that from only living this very life could I get access to.
Ty Gwen, a carehome for traumatised veterans stands abandoned in north Wales, UK
A resident in one of the tiny rooms at the ex forces hostel in east London, November 2001
A homeless ex-soldier looking out the window of an ex-serviceman’s hostel in East London, 2001
Jason Gough, a homeless ex soldier, who lost his eye, due to his rifle back-firing on a training exercise, is photographed after being attacked by a homeless squatter in east London, April 2004
Paul Sinclair, spent 15 months in the army but was demoted and soon discharged. “My family did not want to know me,” he says. “When I left the army I had no home, no address and when I left the gates I cried my eyes out.” After living with his brother, Paul got in touch with an ex-forces charity who found him a room.
The television room in the ex forces hostel, east London, March 2001’Ozzie’ a Royal Navy veteran, was later kicked out of the ex-forces hostel for not ‘hiding’ his can of Special Brew lager
A resident of the ex forces hostel in east London, sleeps at a table in the ‘communal area’ of the Ex-Forces hostel after a drunken night out. December 2001Credits:
Photographer: Stuart Griffiths / stuartgriffiths.net
Into the Mist