When Tom was commissioned to go out and photograph some of the homeless people in philadelphia he was asked to document how they survive, his editor suggested he "might do portraits of the street people,each standing in front of their grates or cardboard boxes or whatever they called home". When Tom actually came to thinking about how he was going to document these people he decided within himself that "it would be the most honest photography i'd ever done".
This to me says that before hand when tackling other subject matters he wasn't being as truly honest to himself as possible which points towards a biased perspective within some of his other works, but what is really interesting to me here is that he had made the distinction himself and when it came down to a controversial matter that he found hard to deal with he made a conscious decision to photograph it in the right way.
Instead of creating posed portraits he took his photojournalism to the next level and followed them through their day and night photographing the real them, a true realistic documentation of what these people really go through. This ended up giving him photographs that won awards and that must have been for a reason.
The power of the realism within the photographs create mass emotions inside me when i look at them because I can really feel the coldness of the streets and how hungry they really are, if he decided to just compile posed portraits all of this would have been lost and the homeless people would have been mis represented. Toms truthfulness to himself behind the camera is what was important here and so I hope i can be strong enough to develop such ethical mentality that lets me capture the best of what I can capture from what is really out there, not a depersonalised representation that could in turn be any homeless person in the world.
