Patrick Ross, is a writer/director from Lawrence, Kansas and a graduate of the University of Kansas. He lives in Los Angeles where he has worked as both a production and casting assistant. Patrick’s feature film debut is the documentary Lazarus (2017), and he is currently in post-production on his second feature documentary, Untitled Kansas Documentary (2018).

For the Lazarus project he spent a year, beginning in July of 2014, interviewing and photographing homeless individuals on the streets of Los Angeles. The endeavor began with a tent encampment underneath the 101 bridge on Alvarado street, continued with the Temple street bridge, Hollywood, and eventually Skid Row.

The 6 pictures exhibited are from the film and are accompanied by various texts taken from a journal during the filming. The photos were taken with an SRT 101 camera and shot on Kodak Professional T-MAX P 3200 Black & White Negative Film.

To learn more visit lazarusinla.com

What originally began as a way to stay visually active with photography, using a film camera to collect interesting images in the area around the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, soon led to encounters with homeless people.

I quickly resorted to journal entries to record our conversations, but as I made repeat visits to my new acquaintances, getting to know individuals and understand the lay of the land, I recognized the need to capture our interactions with video.

Each encounter left me with such strong impressions that I was eventually drawn to skid row on the edge of downtown Los Angeles—one of the most tragic areas in all of urban America. An area of immense suffering, I would discover that skid row is a community that has extremely polarizing effects on an observer. Unlike anywhere else, skid row leaves its visitors with both lows from empathetic pain and ecstatic highs from witnessing the reciprocal generosity within the homeless community. Within the anguish and heartbreak is a sublime beauty of individual pride and mutual concern that binds its residents in a singularity unmatched elsewhere.

This film presents the raw, objective reality of homelessness. Avoiding the standard interview and far too common questioning for backstory, my approach was to simply listen. My goal was to capture the lives of these homeless individuals within their everyday existence, giving more fortunate people, who otherwise would never engage with the homeless, the opportunity to witness these extraordinary people in a humanizing context.

Far too often the homeless are stereotyped, marginalized, and written off. This film aims to remove the veil through which society at large views these amazing individuals, many of whom are among the most resilient, compassionate, and resourceful individuals I have ever encountered.

My life has been enriched by the people I met and came to know in making this film. One of them, Stephen, though homeless, proved to be a creative filmmaker in his own right. He became my friend, filming partner and street contact for skid row. Unfortunately, I lost track of many of the other individuals in the film when the city cleared them out from the areas where I had met them, using plows to scoop up the remaining bits of their possessions.

My hope, is for this film to be a call to action—for people to avoid viewing the homeless through stereotypes and instead to interact directly with homeless individuals showing respect for their humanity.

Avoiding statistics or debates over potential solutions, I seek to provide a platform for the voiceless. The best way to properly address the epidemic of homelessness and develop appropriate solutions is to listen to the homeless themselves. Only they can provide the proper clarity to fully comprehend their plight and to understand the challenge our society needs to face. This film takes the first steps down a long path.