Take a Peek Inside New York's "Batcave"

by Josie Raymond · 2010-07-20 16:04:00 UTC
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The New York Times' always-captivating "Lens" blog today turns the camera toward the chronically homeless living underground in New York City (be sure to click to see the photos in fullscreen). As documented by Andrea Star Reese, a filmmaker-turned-photography student, the people in the images form a community, a society very much like the one above ground that they have difficulty participating in.

Reese began her project by speaking to a wall in a subway tunnel — eventually, the people living behind it stood up and introduced themselves. One of them, named Lisa, was pregnant. Reese later took a photo of Lisa's baby at the hospital and Lisa hung it on the wall of the cave in a broken frame. Over time, Reese developed relationships with lots of people. There's Country, the soft-spoken leader, and Krissy, who's being taken advantage of by men and slowly killed by illnesses, and a woman who goes by Snow White who has a black eye in one photo.

Reese calls these homeless people collaborators, rather than subjects, since the project could not have happened if they weren't invested in sharing their lives with the outside world. "These are chronic homeless," Reese told the Times. "They are not an easy issue, if you were to look at them as an issue. I do not approach them as an issue. I should say this right here: To me this is not an issue; this is about people."

They ended up there for a variety of reasons, ranging from addiction to abuse. The isolation and shame is what's keeping them there. "As Lisa told me," Reese said, "'You feel as though you shouldn't be around people doing what you're doing; that maybe you should be around people like you."

See even more images on Reese's site. Thanks goes to Mark Horvath's always-captivating InvisiblePeople.tv Twitter account for the lead.

Photo credit: BigTallGuy

Josie Raymond is a Change.org editor who has reported from the streets of the South Bronx, written for several magazines that folded (not her fault) and fixed thousands of typos.
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