Tom Stone

I think there’s a decided middle spectrum of humanity where circumstance, luck, and small choices conspire to vastly differing fates. We’re all imperfect, and most of us are only a shadow of who we’d hoped we’d be.

I count it as a measure of our ignorance, the depth of poverty in the world. It’s a glaring marker to how far we have not come.

Born in a Pullman compartment on a train outside Mexico City traveling to Puerto Ángel in Oaxaca, Mexico, Tom Stone spent his earliest years with his mother, Raya Ra, and father, Tony Washington (both parents using assumed names). In a recent interview, he discussed that his mother was physically abused; and, fear for her safety (and that of her son), "fled" – first “sleeping in bushes in wealthy L.A. neighborhoods” and eventually joining the famed Source Family.

Tom Stone's documentary photography appears to be desperate, sometimes surprising, reality of homeless Americans. Striving to present people at “some sort of core,” Stone's work spares viewers nothing of the subject's situation – be it the frantic sadness in awaken!, the addict's unwavering focus in beavis, or the contrast of youthful beauty and yesterday's soil in sadie. His ever-growing gallery raises the question, what separates them from us; what lets us ignore the depth of poverty in the world?

Tom Stone (born July 12, 1971) is an American humanitarian photographer. His work depicts the discrepancy between the American dream and the American reality, clearly captured through the telling faces of those living on the fringes of society. He is most widely known for his documentary photography of outsider, displaced and homeless populations in California.