One Paycheck Away

"Give selflessly and you will reap endlessly" was written on the sign of a homeless man in New York City’s Union Square. Photojournalist Benjamin Lowy stopped to talk to the man and learned that the two had something in common.

The homeless man, Scott Sutton, said he had worked as a photojournalist and then as a darkroom manager for Archive Photos, a group that Getty Images eventually bought. The pair found that they knew a lot of the same colleagues, too.

After talking with Sutton for about half an hour, Lowy snapped a photo of Sutton and posted it to Facebook, not expecting much of a response. The photo had more than 1,200 likes and an outpouring of support from people eager to help, especially from fellow photographers who feel especially connected to Sutton’s plight.

“My first thought was that this could be me at any moment,” one Facebook commenter wrote. "Many here, now that I've read some [comments], have the same sentiment. The winners and the losers in life are often separated only by opportunity and the lack of it."

Sutton, who trained at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said a series of unbearable losses led to his living on the streets. "There came a point in my life when everyone I knew died," Sutton told Lowy. "I lost everyone in my family." The former photographer told Lowy that he took a leave of absence from work after his wife, who was 13 years younger than he, died from heart disease. One thing led to the next and Sutton has now been living on the streets for two years.

Since meeting Sutton, Lowy and his wife have been in close touch with their homeless friend. Whenever the New Jersey couple is in Manhattan, they check in on Sutton and have brought him clothes. They also took him to the Coalition for the Homeless to help him get a social security card and a P.O. box.

After Lowy’s image spread on Facebook, it caught the attention of Sutton’s sister, Roxanne, who hadn’t spoken to her brother since he was a teenager. Together with Lowy and his wife, she launched a $15,000 Go Fund Me campaign to help Sutton secure housing, medical and mental health care and funds for his basic needs.

Today’s gift was to give a donation to the fund to help Scott Sutton. Many articles cite the statistic that one third of Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless. That is a sobering statistic knowing there are many more people like Scott that need assistance.

In Giving,
Robin