browseSomewhere Called Home
Steve Conlan (Photographer)
From the text of the original press release, 1986:
The Homeless Project was started as a result of seeing too many bad and clichéd images of homeless people in my capacity as a picture editor on a Liverpool based magazine. A constant flow of these images crossed my desk, taken by people who were ‘fascinated by the subject’. How anybody could be fascinated by another’s ill fortune was beyond me, it could only serve to perpetuate their own middle class elitism, safe in the knowledge that it could never happen to them. It angered me. ‘Not every homeless person is an alcoholic and certainly not every alcoholic is homeless,’ I would repeat day after day. Sickened by it all I left the magazine and started the Homeless Project.
The local council have their own policies for the homeless, in accordance with the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, 1977, a policy which has left six of its hostels closed since February, a policy which was to provide a ‘high standard emergency hostel’ in place of the Petrus Trust-run Crypt (a shelter which provided accommodation for 628 men during 1984). The Crypt closed on 31st May 1985, and the City Council shelter is yet to be opened. The City Council has a second policy, an urban regeneration strategy, which has placed two of the aforementioned hostels under compulsory purchase orders.
Against this background I felt it was important to look at the homeless hostels in the area and highlight their importance to the residents.
Note: Somewhere Called Home was commissioned by Open Eye in Liverpool. Steve Conlan was brought up in Bootle and in 1985/86 was living in Liverpool, having finished college a couple of years earlier. This was his second photographic project, the first, TV, TS & Drag having been developed in 1984/85.