UPDATE 12/30/2022: The AJAM projects server is no longer live. Files available upon request.
Reporter Laura Murray delved deep into herself and her history for this project. Part memoir and part traditional reportage, Philly's invisible youth both examines rising youth homeless in Philadelphia and humanizes the issues through Laura herself. The project also uses a series of videos based on an audio diary of sort from Laura herself.
In this video, author Laura Murray describes revising the site of a tent city she once slept in. The former tent city is still an abandoned lot.
After her reporting trip, Laura sent me the audio of her interviews so I could see if we could use any of it. In the set of files was one longer piece, maybe 20 minutes long. One night, she found herself driving through the city, revisiting places she'd slept or stayed when she was a homeless teen herself about 15 years ago. We decided to shoot video to accompany her sound. The video was unlike anything I'd ever done before: deliberately blurry, hand-shot in many cases, meant to mimic the emotional quality of the audio.
The project also included some graphics and a list of resources available to homeless youth.
The other two videos can be viewed here: