Each encounter I had with a member of this vast race revealed an individual with a personality all its own, the result of a history at once common and mysterious. Inevitably, I came to see them as they really were: creatures who populated the niches and nooks and corners and alleys of neighborhoods and streets and lives. Some I met in rivers, some on rooftops, still others tangled in heaps with each other.

In time, I began to feel that I was beholding the innocent and fading victims of a vast war waged daily — relics of the ebbing and surging of great forces, the cosmic to and fro, the endless advance and retreat that keeps the heart of a city beating: sometimes frantically, sometimes with a welcome slowness. Some of those I saw had experienced such carnage that only a few rusty body parts remained. Those who were relatively intact but no longer of any use, the forlorn and forgotten, mutely represented a disturbingly casual expendability: specters from the dark and leprous corner of a consumerism gone mad.

And so I began with my camera to record their story, as my movements around town took me through their world. These photographs show them exactly as I found them; as indeed they remain even now, in their places everywhere, waiting only to serve.

—John Einarsen with Robert Brady

The book can be purchased here