Homeless: Hidden in Plain Sight

Livingston Armytage is many things – he’s a human rights lawyer, an expert photographer, and a volunteer at the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Matthew Talbot Hostel in Sydney.

All of these things and more came together to prompt him to pick up a camera and spend a year documenting the lives of people experiencing homelessness in Sydney in a new book.

Livingston has generously made the decision to donate proceeds from the Homeless: Hidden in Plain Sight to the Society to support the work of the Matthew Talbot Hostel.

“I realised that as I approached a homeless person, I would often want to look away or pull out my phone and get terribly busy, or do something other than acknowledge that the person was there.

“And yet when I started to sit down and talk with these homeless people what they all told me is that they felt ignored and completely invisible in plain sight.

“That they were in the middle of the crowd but that everyone was not seeing them.

“I realised that I was one of those people, and that I wasn’t treating them as human beings.

“This troubled me. It led to my learning journey to understand how they got there, and this led in turn to taking the photographs in this book,” he says.

Since an early age, Livingston has had an awareness that homelessness can happen to anyone.

“It could be me or it could be you and no amount of hard work or the good fortune of an education actually protects you from that.

“Indeed, when I talk to many homeless people while photographing them, they would often tell me, ‘I had no idea – 10 years ago I couldn’t have imagined this would be me.’

“I’ve learned that there were many causes to homelessness, but when they’re all boiled down, I now understand that it’s one knock too many that can shatter a life’s equilibrium,” he says.

Livingston says working on the book reinforced to him that it carries a message useful to everyone.

“After a while, I became more and more conscious of the passers by going beside the homeless person.

“And I could see that they were as much affected by the discomfort that I’d felt.

“They’d also immediately pick up their mobile phone and start getting busy, or they’d talk to their friend, or they’d look the other way – all the stuff that I’d done.

“It dawned on me that the journey I was making, learning how to respect and give dignity to homeless people was something that could be useful to everyone,” he says.

Livingston says one of the reasons why he decided to start work on Homeless: Hidden in Plain Sight was because he knows the value images carry.

“One of the reasons why I picked up the camera was to improve my ability to communicate.

“It’s my experience that one photograph, not just can tell a 1000 words, but it can touch the heart and affect feelings in the way no amount of scholarly reports will do,” he says.

If you would like to buy a copy of Homeless: Hidden in Plain Sight, you can do so here.