A few years ago, I gave a camera and some film to a homeless kid I had befriended while visiting some family in San Luis Obispo CA. He had been thrown out of his parents house for drugs a month ago, and been crashing with friends, generally bumming around the central coast since then. After giving him a brief lesson in the use of a manual camera (it was this beat up old Fujica 35mm), I asked him to shoot all the film, then mail it back to me. In exchange, I’d let him keep the camera. I didn’t expect to hear from him again, but the kid seemed interested in photography, and he didn’t have much else going for him, so I gave him the camera and the film.

A few months ago, I received a large envelope filled with photos in the mail from the kid, along with a brief letter describing what he had been doing since I last saw him. There were about a hundred photos, mostly horribly under or over exposed pictures of people sitting around, but here are the more interesting ones.