Marquis Heines sat shirtless in a wheelchair, hidden from the Utah sun under a scrap of tree shade.

He leaned forward, eyes pinched in a fashion-model squint, his face aimed at a photographer. Over his shoulders, in the background but not part of the photo shoot, a half-dozen people were sprawled along the Salt Lake City sidewalk, men and women who like Heines are part of the city's booming unhoused population.

"Beautiful," the photographer said, according to video taken during the shoot. "Now I need your eyes to smile."

Kseniya Kniazeva, 38, stood at the photographer's elbow. "Think of the greatest love of your life," she called to Heines, coaching him through the look. "Cross your legs again, look like you are resting."

Heines brought one leg up over the other, exposing where each limb narrowed to an abrupt surgical end below the ankle. Last year, frost bite from sleeping outside cost Heines both his feet.

"Imagine you're chilling on the beach and you are about to seduce a beautiful woman!" Kniazeva said. "Instead of 'angry,' I want your eyes to smile a little bit, a little passion in the eyes."

Heines rearranged his face.

"That's it," the photographer said. "That's it!"

Kniazeva shot the model a thumbs up and Heines's face exploded into a smile.

The photo shoot was part of the local homeless aid outfit Nomad Alliance's "Sexy Nomad" calendar, a 12-month spread of unsheltered men in seductive centerfold poses and pouts. The 2024 edition will be the organization's third calendar.

Organizers say the experience can be uplifting for the men who participate, a way to humanize a group that is often ignored or shunned. But some advocates see the calendar and some of the group's other outreach work as exploitive. Utah officials are investigating a complaint filed by a former Nomad volunteer over the treatment of a family who say they felt pressured to pose for the calendar, among other issues.

Kniazeva denied the allegations of the complaint but said the situation "underscores the difficulty of our work."

The idea and vision behind the calendar is all Kniazeva's, the organization's director and only paid employee. Since starting the Nomad Alliance in 2020, Kniazeva has elbowed into the arena of Salt Lake City's social services providers with unconventional tactics. "Sexy Nomads" is the most unorthodox - and controversial.

"All publicity is good publicity," Kniazeva said. "I wanted to do something to highlight the beauty and humanity of these people, especially when I see how often they are demeaned and ignored and treated as an invisible people."

The calendar has helped attract attention and grants to the organization, as well as resources that are badly needed at a time when Utah's newly homeless population has risen by 10 percent and Salt Lake City's overall unsheltered community has jumped 55 percent.

During the 2023 point-in-time count in January, when volunteers walked across Salt Lake City one night counting the area's unsheltered population, they found 435 homeless individuals, a significant surge from the 281 counted in 2022.

Nomad Alliance grew out of Kniazeva's own experience of homelessness. During the pandemic, she said her new wellness business lost clients and then she lost her own housing and began living in a trailer. But she immediately began organizing supply drives for items like sleeping bags, socks, underwear, blankets and hygiene items for people living in the encampments that were popping up across Salt Lake City.

Nomad Alliance, incorporated as a nonprofit in February 2021, hosted frequent supply drives while also offering regular workshops for unsheltered individuals on everything from self-defense to art therapy.

Last winter, when Utah's winter temperatures dipped below freezing, Kniazeva got ahold of a repurposed 2001 food truck, spread blankets across the seatless cabin and created a mobile warming station.

There were no barriers. Anyone could come. But parking permits, vehicle title issues and emissions tests all became problematic. Kniazeva admitted at the time the alliance was really learning on the run.

"As an organization, we don't have a lot of resources," she said. "But the problem we are facing is really bad. When we started our work in 2020, so many people were falling to the streets, and ever since the eviction moratorium ended we're seeing so many more falling into the streets."

The Nomad Alliance eventually attracted funding. The Utah Homelessness Council awarded it a grant for outreach work that amounted to $25,000, according to Kniazeva. She said the organization also received $28,000 from a philanthropic foundation. Those grants allowed Kniazeva to make around $3,000 a month before taxes in salary, she said. But she still lives in her trailer parked on a friend's property. "I'm still technically homeless, even though it's bougie homeless," she said.

The competitive scramble for resources and attention was what inspired the Sexy Nomad calendar. The idea of featuring Salt Lake City's homeless men in a prominent calendar also came from Kniazeva's own experience modeling.

"I had really low self-esteem for a lot of my life. I never thought I was pretty until I was asked to step in-front of a camera," she said. "It helped me realize that I have power and value and that I'm being seen and that I'm important. I wanted to give that to my friends on the street."

Kniazeva found professional photographers willing to shoot the calendar for free, and a printer who donated materials and time for the production. Eventually sponsors added money for the project, from local bread companies and bars and restaurants to law firms and apparel companies.

Models, however, took some convincing, Kniazeva admitted.

The men were not only asked to share their bodies but life stories. Kniazeva's concept for the calendar featured models sprawled in poses with write-ups on their lives - how they ended up on the streets, the substance-use issues and mental battles they struggle with, and their hopes for the future.

"The hardest part about being out here is the mental state," Ben, 31, was quoted saying in 2023's February calendar. "I always thought I wasn't really good looking, but looking at these photos, man, you guys put it on the money."

"Sometimes I think I've got more face tattoos than friends," Bumblebee, 34, said in his April 2023 spread.

"Paying rent and all that isn't easy," Brad, 59, said on his August 2023 page. "Especially with health problems . . . if you get too far behind it's hard to get back up there."

Kniazeva said the calendar sold only 35 copies at $40 per calendar. But she argued that the project acted more as the organization's calling card, something to hand out to everyone from local and statewide politicians to the police officers who regularly patrol encampments. The images served as a reminder that each homeless individual was a unique person with his own story.

Late in July, as the Nomad Alliance was preparing to set up photo shoots for the 2024 calendar, the organization threw itself into helping a husband and wife and their four young children who were living on the streets. The Mills family was briefly featured on local news after taking care of a stolen Shih Tzu dog but not receiving $2,500 in reward money offered by the owner.

Following the story, the Nomad Alliance set up a GoFundMe page for the family, trying to raise $30,000. "[T]heir most pressing need is to buy a newer trailer that would comply with KOA standards and move the family off the street," the page stated. "Despite having a housing voucher and applying for hundreds of apartments, the family has been denied for all housing because of the father's criminal record."

Moriah Mills, mother of the four children, said the GoFundMe was Kniazeva's idea. As the donations piled up - eventually more than $36,000 - the family appreciated Nomad's help. But eventually Kniazeva "began talking about getting a house," Mills said.

"It's not logical for us to move into a house when I have no income," she said. "I can't plan on her just creating more GoFundMes to pay off a mortgage. I can't trust my kids's lives to that. And then she flipped it and said that we just wanted to stay on the streets."

As the donations were underway, Mills said Kniazeva asked her husband to pose for the Sexy Nomad calendar. Mills said the couple did not feel like they could say no when the organization had done so much for them. "He was coerced into doing those photos," she said. "He didn't want to do those."

The family said they have not yet received the money from the GoFundMe campaign. Mills's husband is now in jail on a probation violation, according to Mills.

Carol Powell, a retired Utah State Government Human Services employee, started volunteering this summer with the Nomad Alliance, working with the Mills family. But the interactions between Kniazeva and the family resulted in Powell breaking ties with the group.

Powell said she filed a complaint with the state about the "exploitation of the Mills family and the sexualization" of the husband "being coerced into posing for the Nomad Alliance Sexy Nomad Calendar."

Mills has asked the photos of her husband not be used in the calendar.

Sarah Nielson, public information officer for the state's Department of Workforce Services, confirmed that a complaint had been made against the organization and that an investigation was underway.

"We are treating all concerns with the utmost seriousness and are presently in the process of evaluating this complaint in accordance with the state's established policies and procedures," Nielson said.

Kniazeva said "it was never a condition of working with them to be on the calendar." She said that Nomad Alliance will not use the photo's of Mills's husband per the family's request. In video from the photo session and in text messages after the shoot, Mills and her husband seemed happy with the experience, Kniazeva said.

While acknowledging and apologizing for how she spoke to the family, Kniazeva said: "We are trying to be good stewards of the donations per the intention of the GoFundMe," she said. "This money wasn't just for a nice trailer to remain on the streets. This was meant to get the family off the street."

Nomad Alliance is now working to get the Mills family a new trailer with the GoFundMe donations. "We will have better vetting of clients and volunteers in the future," Kniazeva said.

One sunny afternoon in September, David "Wolf" Randall was standing shirtless on a rock as a photographer snapped and Kniazeva talked the first-time model through the experience.

"Suck in!," she said, meaning Randall's stomach, according to video from the shoot. "No smiling! Be serious! I want to see your eyes! Look at the camera like you really want it!"

That same day, Michael Yorganson, 34, also took a turn before the camera. He and his partner welcomed a son in February after finding housing through the Nomad Alliance. Both father and baby Kendall posed for the 2024 project besides desolate train tracks with a line of mountains spreading across the background.

"Honestly, I am not a huge fan of photographs in general," Yorganson admitted after the shoot. "Luckily Kendall is a cute baby, so hopefully he'll steal the show. But I also think that anything that helps push awareness to the issue is not a bad thing."