Faces of Addiction

I will admit that it is often hard for me to see the humanity of an addict.

Years of excuses, lying, cheating, and every sort of pain have pretty much robbed me of the ability to feel sympathetic.

But I am glad I spent some time this morning to take a look at this project: Faces of Addiction.

I think there is a tendency among women to have too much sympathy for the addicts in our lives - which often causes us to put up with too much. So most of my writing centers around that.

But this reminded me of the other side of the coin. Most addicts do not have the safety net of a rich father who will always bail them out.

[These are] the stories of addicts in the Hunts Point neighborhood, the poorest in all of New York City. I post people's stories as they tell them to me.

What I am hoping to do, by allowing my subjects to share their dreams and burdens with the viewer and by photographing them with respect, is to show that everyone, regardless of their station in life, is as valid as anyone else.

Its easy to ignore others. By not looking, by not talking to them, we can fall into constructing our own narrative that affirms our limited world view.

http://jezebel.com/5982500/sex-workers-and-drug-addicts-open-up-in-faces-of-addiction