OVERVIEW:
From the very beginning of this project, I wanted to work with people. I wanted to represent Paris in relationships with people because that’s how I usually remember places and what has the most impact on me. I started by listing out all the people that. I’ve met in Paris and stuck out to me, and unintentionally, they were all homeless people. So, I was thinking about how to relate the homeless with this project about Paris but realized that homeless people are still part of Paris despite their living situations.
CONCEPT:
When thinking of Paris, and the people of Paris, most people won’t immediately think of homeless people. They are often invisible in a city like Paris and aren’t considered part of society. Nowadays especially, with the current situation ofthe pandemic, their living situations are even worse, their health is more at risk and fewer people come up to talk or interact with them.
So, with my project, I wanted to give a voice to these people, shine a light on them, and finally making them visible. To do so, I wanted to illustrate some of the homeless people with whom I have actually had an interaction and that have had an impact on me in some way.
PROCESS:
I used photoshop and Illustrator to illustrate these people from my memory. To do so, I gathered a lot of pictures of people who look like the face I have in mind and combined them together in a collage to recreate the face closest to the one in my mind. I distorted the faces and added some illustrations and colors.
Some of the faces I used:
Though the faces I created are distorted because that’s how I remember them. I don’t have a clear and defined face in mind that I could recreate excatly. It’s also a way to highlight their facial features making them more striking. Moreover, adding colors to the faces gives them more life and making the people more alive.
FINAL COLLAGES:
The final outcome of this project is a website where you can select the face of one of the homeless people on the homepage and it directs you to another page with their specific address and extra information that I have added based on my own interactions with them. The map with the address is linked to a google maps page with the exact address so that people can actually go and meet them. And with the information provided, you can identify them, know what they do and what they like for example. I haven’t had the same amount of interactions with all of them so the amount of information varies from one person to another.
FEEDBACK:
Barbara thought the collages were beautiful, and that these people are often marginalized within the society so this website helps them come out of this alienation They are normal people that often have problems that lead them to live on the street and that no one actually chooses this life.
Yvonne noticed that she has already met the old lady that lives in the metro a couple of times and that she thinks the college is really accurate and captures her character. The information provided also helped her identify her. That is something that really made me happy because this is excactly what I was trying to do with this project. She also said that she appreciated the fact that I create a platform just for them because at the end of the day we are all just people.
Shaskia really liked the outcome of the collages.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
After realizing this website, I didn’t want to stop just there and really wanted to create more but decided to just stick with these because I wanted the faces to actually be from memory and not just imagine faces.
It also made me wish I had more interactions with homeless people. If I go back to Paris anytime soon I would love to have more interactions and add more faces to the website.
I would love to see people use the website to meet these people. Especially these days, people don’t go out as much to so not as many people meet with the homeless. Also, some of these people’s meals come from leftover restaurant foods for example but since these are also closed, I can imagine that they are having a really tough time.
So, using this website to know the exact locations of homeless people will help a lot firstly because you can go straight to the address and secondly because instead of walking for hours to find a homeless person to whom you can give leftover food for example, you can just use this website anytime.