Erin Sheridan: Project Proposal

In Boise, Idaho, in 2022, I sat across the table from a social worker tasked with monitoring the area’s homeless encampment communities. As he described the discrimination his clients experience on the streets, he paused. “I can imagine what it’s like to experience violence on the streets,” he told me. “But I cannot imagine what it feels like to be disappeared by your entire community.”

This conversation is often on my mind as I report from inside the Bay Area’s homeless encampment communities. Encampments are a routine sight in Alameda County. Post Johnson v Grants Pass, a case that overturned Martin v Boise and re-legalized the imposition of criminal penalties against residents who violate cities’ anti-camping ordinances, local governments are ramping up efforts to sweep homeless encampments from sight. These communities are often described as a public health and safety risk, hubs of drug use and crime, and harmful to neighborhoods and infrastructure.

And yet, have you ever walked into one to talk to the people who live there?

Residents of encampments across Alameda County work, go to school, run businesses, have families, hobbies, and pets. Many of them are longtime residents who simply cannot afford the cost of rent and aren’t leaving, because this is the place they’ve always called home, and they want to be a part of it. They are disproportionately people of color, seniors, and people with disabilities.

Barriers to entry in local shelter systems are manifold, and residents with disabilities often choose to camp instead. They face waitlists for subsidized housing that can last over a decade and are seeking ways to survive.

This project comes at a pivotal moment: encampment residents are organizing themselves. They’re preparing lawsuits, operating eviction defense networks, and helping each other relocate before encampment closures, known as “sweeps”. 

I propose to photograph residents of Alameda County encampments between January and April 2025. Some vérité style photographs will document people’s daily lives, their ingenuity and organizing, and efforts by governments to displace them. But I will also work with 2-3 identified subjects to take portraits that we develop together. 

Giving people experiencing homelessness agency in how they’re photographed counters a voyeuristic gaze that has historically kept them segregated from collective discourse, without voice in their own narratives. The portraits will serve as documents of resistance against that erasure.

The photographs will be colorful, textural, and shot close enough to capture detail, using prime lenses. This requires relationship building, enabling me to capture genuine moments, with the full consent of those in front of my camera.

In total, I will produce at least 10 photographs that bring our unhoused neighbors back into public view, on their own terms.