Under the Passaic Falls

After living abroad for 13 years, returned to his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, and discovered a network of homeless people living in abandoned 19th-century mills. Darling set out to document those lives in a series of photographs that he calls One homeless veteran, Bob (seated far left, smoking), has become the center of Darling’s project, which the photographer describes here. The images address the familiar problems of addiction, mental illness, and poverty in a city that was once an industrial powerhouse.