Pam Parlapiano, who teaches photography at Pathways to Housing, an organization that finds housing for homeless people with psychiatric disabilities, has little interest in her students’ pasts—their years spent living adrift bus terminals or shelters, bouts in jail or mental institutions.

“Once they walk in this room and have a camera in their hands,” Parlapiano says emphatically, “they are photographers.”

“Portraits in Deep—The Photographers of Pathways,” which opens at Soho Photo on Jan. 5, shows the work of 20 of these photographers, each a portrait of a fellow student or students. Most are close-ups, some tender, others funny or sad. But all find  humanity in their subjects.

“After awhile, something happens to the students,” says Parlapiano. “People who have been riding the subways, who have been totally anonymous, start to emerge as individuals. Other students I have taught, I have to spend a lot of time encouraging them to look deeper, to be honest. I don’t have to say that to these students. They want to say something all the time, because they have never been listened to.”

In Parlapiano’s Pathway classes (she teaches four around the city), she encourages her students, most of whom had never held a camera, to think about their subjects’ personalities, to look for emotion, to snap only when their “guts” tell them that that’s the picture.

She firmly believes that the creativity her students find in themselves is often an extention of their “over-the-top personalities, their sensitivities and their intensity.”

“You have a gift,” she tells them frequently. “Remember, if we remove from the walls of museums all the work of people with extreme emotion, the walls would be empty.”

 

Soho Photo, 15 White St., sohophoto.com, 212-226-8571. Jan. 5– 30. Opening reception: Tue, Jan. 5, 6–8 pm. Open Wed–Sun, 1–6 pm.