Ojos
This image is part of the ‘Ojos’ bi-weekly series. Ojos is a photoletter that tributes people, their merits, the environment and connects our human experience to community with the use of a camera—here in the Bay Area.
David Stinnett briefly glances towards the camera lens underneath a tree-lined street in the upper Mission District. The sun had emerged from the rain clouds that morning, which created a soft pocket of sunlight, gently brushing on Stinnett’s bruised eyelids and grinning face. He told me that he was assaulted in the Tenderloin for $20 just days earlier but was assuring that he is in good spirits. “I’m not homeless, I’m home free,” the 53-year-old expressed. According to Stinnett, he’s lived in a van for more than a decade in San Francisco and calls himself a “street counselor.” With San Francisco’s failed attempt to patch over the city’s unhoused epidemic for the polarizing Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last month, this year’s final Ojos was documented just days after APEC, to honor the humanity found in people like Stinnett.