I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast
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Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling.
This episode is sponsored by New Calm.
And as many of you know, I only bring sponsors onto this show whose products I truly swear
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Now we are an overworked and under slept population, especially those of us that wear uniform for
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show artist and street photographer, Suzanne Stein.
Now as you will hear in this conversation, there is a spectrum of art when it comes to
this field.
However, as she discusses, some is very family friendly and then the other side of the spectrum
is truly portraying the desperation and some of our streets.
And Suzanne has definitely become a beacon of light in that area.
So we discuss a host of topics from her own journey into the arts and ultimately photography,
her interactions with the homeless community, the opioid epidemic, the horrors of trank
addiction, censorship and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredibly powerful and important conversation, as I say every
week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the
show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of over 850 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Suzanne Stein.
Enjoy.
Well, Suzanne, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking some time.
I know you've got a lot going on in your house at the moment, people towing and throwing.
So I want to thank you for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast this afternoon.
Thank you so much for inviting me and thank you for putting up with the difficulty with
me today.
No problem at all.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this afternoon?
I'm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
So as we kind of had a couple of chats prior, so as I asked you the first time, I would
love to start at the very beginning.
You've got a very interesting journey, not only with photography, but obviously the people
that you found yourself around and the lens that you have on some of the issues that some
of our brothers and sisters in our communities are struggling with.
But I would love to start at the beginning of your journey.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
I was born in Calcasca, Michigan, and that's like Northern Michigan, so it's a lot of snow.
But I wasn't raised there.
I was raised, my family, well, my dad was in the, he was in the Air Force.
So then we went to Germany and we were in Germany when I was a baby for a long time.
And then we came back to Philadelphia, which is where my father's from.
My mother was from Michigan.
That's why my dad was stationed up there.
So I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and I grew up with a, you know, I had a brother.
He was four years younger than me and I grew up in the seventies and you know, I had a
weird childhood because my family, my dad and mom got divorced when I was seven.
And at the time that this happened, it was, there were very rigid ideas about what families
were.
A family was a mom, a dad and kids.
You know, there wasn't like some gay couple with kids.
There wasn't like a divorce.
There wasn't like a black and a white person married.
There was, you know, a mom and a dad.
And you know, we grew up in a very, you know, suburban mentality.
So when that happened, it really set me apart being, having that divorce.
Plus I'm half Jewish.
And as a kid, I really felt that, that we were different.
There was, I, well, considering what's happening now, I've grown up with a lot of weird kind
of a little anti-Semitism when I was little, some stuff happening to us.
But I had a kind of okay childhood with my dad.
He took good care of us, but we were kind of like these sloppy, dirty kids.
Cause my dad didn't know how to clean.
And my mother, when she left, she kind of went through a second childhood and my mother
has a history of alcohol and drug abuse.
Like my mom, for whatever reason, she was able to keep it together and always have a
job like a menial job, like in cafeterias or as a janitor.
So she always worked, but she was basically a Skid Row drunk.
She really was.
And she did a lot of drugs.
So when I was a kid, if she lived in a trailer, it's kind of like a caricature a little bit.
I hate to say it, but she was kind of a stereotype of a, I don't want to say it, but a low income
kind of drunken white female.
I hate to put it that way, but it was pretty bad.
And like she'd have all these little boxes laying around, like you keep jewelry in or
you keep keepsakes in like little keepsake boxes from different places, enamel boxes.
And when I was a kid, I'd like to open them up and I'd always find drugs.
Like I'd be thinking I'd be finding jewelry or something special or interesting.
And it was drugs like powders and pills and all kinds of stuff.
So I grew up with a parent, one parent that was completely grossly irresponsible and was
hooking up with criminals.
It was really scary, like bank robbers.
Like it was really scary.
And my dad would have to leave us with her because his job required him to be on the
road.
And it was just kind of a weird deal with my mom.
So I had kind of an odd situation on one hand in my childhood, but on the other hand, I
had a great childhood with my dad who really tried hard to make up for all the deficits
of my mom.
With the lens that you have now, I'm working with a lot of people who are struggling with
addiction.
When you look back, are there any, do you have any idea of where her trauma came from
that sent her into her own version of addiction?
I don't think everybody who's addicted had trauma.
I think that some people who have addiction like being high and they like the feeling
of it.
And there are people who have had trauma and who are reacting to trauma.
I photographed many of them.
And then there are other people who are narcissists and who like being high and who get high.
And they then abandon their family and their responsibilities.
Not every single person who's struggling with addiction is also suffering from trauma.
Now my mom had a bumpy childhood in spots with her father, but my mom was always narcissistic
and a little antisocial.
So I think some people who get high a lot or they're getting high a lot and they're
doing what they want to do.
It's not a reaction to a trauma necessarily.
Now you're bouncing from house to house.
Obviously there's some turmoil in some of the homes.
What were you playing and doing?
What were your positive outlets as a child?
I used to draw.
I was a really good artist.
I was a very good writer.
I used to like to draw and write.
I loved, I would get interest, very strong interest.
It could be in horses or dogs or native Americans, astronomy, evolution.
I had all kinds of interests.
I was really good in school.
So I found a lot to be interested in in the world and I read a great deal.
From a very young age, like the third grade, I read Helter Skelter, the whole book.
I read always adult books from the age of eight.
So I had a really active mental kind of life and I had a lot of things that I was really,
really fascinated by.
So I was able to kind of immerse myself in that stuff.
My mother was somewhat abusive as well.
So those days were really hard to spend with her.
But I found that I could bury my nose in a book, draw, do the things that I had to do
to kind of disconnect from that situation so I could kind of stay afloat.
What about career aspirations?
When you were in the school age, what were you dreaming of becoming?
I think, well, I was kind of fat.
I wanted to be a ballerina when I was fat.
But I wanted to be a doctor, an astronomer.
I wanted to be an anthropologist.
But what happened to me when I was 13, I began to experiment with drugs.
And when I did that, my schoolwork just slid.
I never really caught up.
And I think that's when my childhood caught up to me when I was 13.
So up until 13, I was an amazing student.
And then at 13, I started doing a lot of drugs.
And I just almost failed the eighth grade and had to go to summer school.
And I became like, instead of being at the top of my class, I was in the bottom third.
And I never really came out of that.
Because I think that's when all the trauma of my own childhood, because there was a lot
of trauma with my mother, it was bad.
There was a lot of weird men, a lot of really bad stuff, a suicide and all kinds of crazy
stuff.
That's when the trauma hit me.
And I just really started to flounder in high school.
I had a really tough high school experience.
And what were the drugs that you were using back then?
When I was a kid, it started out with marijuana.
And then it was hash, and then it was speed.
And we would use barbiturates, some hallucinogens, but that wasn't my thing.
It was mostly marijuana, hash, and a lot of speed.
And I finally, I did it for about a year and a half.
And then I realized I couldn't think straight anymore.
Like my mind was gone.
I couldn't remember things.
I used to play guitar.
Like I said, I had a lot of interests.
And I began to recognize that my memory, which used to be photographic, was gone.
So I stopped.
I stopped doing drugs, and I lost all those friends that I had that were druggy friends.
And they were very important to me.
And I lost every one of them.
And it came as a real shock.
At the time, I was only 14.
So I didn't really understand the dynamics of why people are friends, why they gravitate
towards each other, and that if one person makes a positive change, that can reflect
poorly on everybody else.
And they just ostracize me.
So that also set me into a total tailspin.
And it was just a lot of trauma.
And at that time, I mean, we're going back into the 80s.
So now anything goes.
You can be he, she, they.
You can be whatever now.
And you're supposed to be accepted.
I don't think that you're always accepted in every high school in the United States.
But in my high school in the middle of a cornfield in Pennsylvania, it was very rigidly defined
social stratifications.
And so when I left the smart kids, the smart kids were freaked out.
Then I was a druggy for a while.
And then I left that, and nobody would touch me.
Like I just didn't fit anymore.
And I lacked the social skills to know because of all the stuff I'd been through.
Generally, I didn't really understand how to save myself because I wasn't really coming
from a level place.
If I'd been more, had better parental intervention, like my dad was great, but he didn't intervene
at all.
He was not a strong figure as far as discipline.
So I was really on my own, completely on my own.
And I just couldn't, I didn't know how to handle any of this.
And I just didn't make good decisions.
And I had no, it's weird as I'm talking about this, I'm understanding it better.
But I really didn't have a solid footing.
And I didn't know how to resurrect myself.
And so with all the trauma, as I mentioned, I just wound up really screwing up in high
school and couldn't get into college.
I wound up getting accepted into an Ivy league school here in Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania, but it wasn't until I was an adult.
I'd never thought of it that way, that if someone is in a group that is dragging them
down, for example, and they're not that dragging them down, but they're all kind of falling
simultaneously a better way of putting it.
That when one of them rises up, they become ostracized.
And it kind of reflects a little bit.
When I was younger, I had a group of lads and I got into the summer camp exchange program.
So I would go to America for three months, work on a summer camp, counseling kids, and
then come back.
And that broke the tribe like each time, I think it was only two or three.
And then I basically felt like I wasn't part of it.
And it was almost because I was off on these adventures, they wanted to kind of pull me
down again.
And there's no negative towards them, but that tribal dynamic, I was the oddball.
I was off doing something.
And so you get these people that want to leave this circle that they're in that maybe isn't
serving them correctly, but we all need tribalism.
We all need to belong.
So that's a huge barrier of leaving an unhealthy environment is the fact that you might find
yourself alone, which in itself can be detrimental.
Yeah.
I think also when you abandon poor, like bad habits, it's a judgment on those that are
still in it.
Even though they're kids, you're in their minds, you're saying that you're better, that
you've rejected something because it's not good enough for you.
And that was definitely the feeling that I gave them by not just not wanting to do drugs
anymore.
I thought we could all hang around.
I just didn't do drugs.
And we were also victims of pedophiles as well as young girls.
This all started when I was about 12, went till I was about 14.
And there were all kinds of adult males that were all over us.
And some of my friends had relationships with guys in their 30s when they were 12 and 13.
We were a group of kids that were latchkey kids.
That was the term.
We were single parent family kids.
A lot of them were mothers raising their kids.
In my case, it was my dad and they just had their hands full and they didn't know what
the hell was going on.
We were doing drugs.
We were hitchhiking.
We were sleeping in abandoned houses.
We were sneaking out at night.
We were breaking and entering into homes, in the storerooms.
We were vandalizing.
I left all that out.
I was doing a lot of bad things.
I was really, really bad.
Okay.
And I got brought home by the police twice.
And after I stopped doing drugs, I had always looked at these adults like they were gross.
They never really liked me, these adults.
They were also criminals selling drugs.
It was really bad.
Really like the lowest class of people in our community.
And we were really vulnerable because we were single parent kids.
And we were growing up in a time when there was no social media.
There wasn't as much information out there for parents to access.
There was no way to look stuff up.
You had to go to a bookstore or have a set of encyclopedias.
Parents didn't know what drugs we were doing.
There was no news popping up on your Google feed when you wake up in the morning to tell
you what's going on with kids in school.
There was nothing like that.
So we were like wild animals, literally wild, running wild.
And when I walked away from the situation, some of my friends were really being exploited.
And I'm sure that they never really recovered from some of it.
And I think when you walk away from that kind of situation, they just passed judgment on
me.
They kind of reverse it and make it seem like you're the loser.
And that kind of stayed with me.
And you can't really transition back into another friend group.
It's hard now for kids, I'm sure.
I know that there's tremendous amount of bullying.
My son went through it in high school in New York.
But back when I was growing up, the impression was very lasting of not really fitting in
because the social habits were different than they are now.
The level of acceptance was really a lot lower.
I always found it so strange being an English schoolboy watching American films with the
jocks and the goths and the geeks and putting the geeks in the lockers because you just
didn't see that here.
And my wife said she didn't see the kind of the caricatures of those groups.
So much in America.
But yeah, it was very clicky.
And in the English schools, at least when I grew up, there was none of that.
There was the kids that were good at sports, maybe.
But everyone kind of somewhat got on.
The kids didn't like each other, of course.
But there was no kind of cliques or tribes within school.
It was your history class or your main room or whatever it was.
But we were just put together of all shapes and sizes, colors and creeds.
So it was kind of weird to look at that.
And I ask people to this day, was your high school experience like that?
Or was it just cartoon?
But some people had great organic, healthy high school experiences and some lived those
movies.
Yeah, I think that in America, because we have a history of like, well, I don't know
what it's like in other parts of the world as far as growing up.
But we had a history of racism and stuff, and the racism here goes in all directions.
It isn't just in one direction.
And the distrust and just this really absurd clannishness.
Anything that's different.
In my high school, there was a couple of Korean kids, a couple of Jewish kids, a couple of
black kids, a couple of Indian kids.
And the rest of them were white and because I'm white, I'm half Jewish, the name was very
different.
So I caught a lot of anti-Semitic commentary from other kids.
But the fact is that I'm white and I have blue eyes.
So that didn't set me apart as much as some of the other kids.
But we were all this weird group of kids that were just from other parts.
It was just honestly, it was an awful experience.
My high school experience.
I so wish I could have grown up in an urban environment where there would have been a
lot more diversity.
I hate that word, but I really needed to be in that kind of environment.
But I grew up in a really stratified, very kind of, I don't know, do you know who Archie
Bunker is?
Yes.
The character?
Yeah.
I was very much, even though it was a suburban, almost country location, the mentality was
very much like that.
And it was really damaging.
So you pull away from this friend group.
Talk to me about graduation and where you find yourself as far as in the workplace.
I graduated and I went to community college.
And then I kind of had a nervous breakdown.
I think it was, again, all that trauma.
I don't know.
I got really sick.
I think I probably had a serious foodborne illness and I couldn't leave the house for
six weeks.
I was really, really, really, really sick.
And it triggered a nervous breakdown.
And all of this stuff with my mother and all this crazy stuff, and my mother was really
crazy at that time, and that's when my life really changed.
I had this nervous breakdown and when I came out of it, I was a lot healthier.
It was like I had to shed this high school thing and then I got a job as a waitress.
I was very shy, but I got this job as a waitress and I gained a lot of confidence.
And then I left and I moved to New York City at the age of barely like 20, 21.
And that's when I became very, very competent.
My whole life changed after I had that nervous breakdown.
So I became an actress in New York.
I studied theater and I used to like to write a lot.
I did my own monologues.
I had kind of a New York kind of life for a while.
And then I don't know how far you want me to go into that.
But I hadn't really found my driving passion in life.
I had interests and I had abilities.
I was a great writer, always was, probably better when I was younger than I am now.
Now I think too much about what I'm writing, but I'm trying to get out of that habit and
I'm trying to write more now.
But I hadn't really found my passion.
Like that sounds ridiculous, but I didn't have a calling until I had a car accident
and I became disabled when I was in my late 20s and I had a serious back injury.
And I was disabled for a few years, like really disabled.
I was in a rehab hospital and it was very, very bad situation.
And it took me years to recover.
And as I recovered, I discovered that I was a really good artist.
I started to draw and that was the first time I realized I had any worth, like that I had
this real talent.
I never felt, I think that if someone has an ability, like let's say you're a dancer
or you're a gymnast or you're a runner, you have this natural ability.
It's like this amazing sense of freedom and like joy and euphoria that you just can do
something that you're so good at.
I'd never really had that feeling until I started drawing and I was really, really good
at it.
I had a really offbeat kind of, I had a lot of the same subjects that I have now, except
I drew.
But as good as I was, I wasn't able to really fully articulate my ability into an artistic
statement and into like a body of work.
And after a few years, I got pregnant and I had my son and I became the single parent
of a kid on the autistic spectrum, which has been really very difficult.
And then I discovered photography and that's when I found myself was when I discovered
photography.
That's when I like really found myself.
So you've done the art of acting, which is funny.
You went to New York, I went to London after drama school and got stuck in this vicious
circle of I had an agent tell me, I really like I did the showcase.
I really like what you did, but you wouldn't be in my area of the agency.
So let us know, and it was William Morris, let us know when you get work and we'll send
the right person over to come watch you.
And then it was just like, I couldn't get work, I didn't have an agent and I couldn't
get an agent.
Yeah, I needed work to get an agent.
I needed an agent to get work.
So I was stuck in this vicious circle.
So I'm always impressed by anyone who enters New York, London and is successful because
I mean, I basically wasn't, I couldn't get through that door.
And it wasn't like I had real endurance or longevity.
It wasn't really my calling and I definitely was not a good actor.
But a kind of niche actor, I was a very physical stunt man type role.
But yeah, I don't think people realize you don't just graduate drama school, move to
London and start working.
There's a lot of barriers to entry.
And if you're stuck in that revolving door, you might just be spinning the rest of your
career.
I found in New York, it took me a while to understand this, but a lot of it depended
on your look.
So I wound up getting these really great headshots by this photographer named Ruffi.
He was the guy for a while in the 80s.
And I wasn't very, I'm not photogenic.
Like I don't look good, right?
I don't look, I look much better in person than I do on camera.
I just do.
So he even thought I was, he thought I'd be photogenic, but he was appalled.
I was not photogenic.
He managed.
That's not what you want to hear.
It took him forever.
He was like, Oh, you'll be fine.
You'll take beautiful pictures.
And he just started sweating.
He could not get it looking right.
Okay.
So what I discovered was that it was about the way you looked.
If you have the right headshot and you fit the look, then you could get in to see somebody.
And I didn't have to look and I had no connections and I didn't understand.
I went into it with the idea that it was like the movie fame, that if you were really good
and really interesting and really into it, and I wrote most of my own monologues that
you were going to get discovered.
And what I really should have been doing was doing a lot of performance space stuff and
pushing my way into clubs and performing on stage.
But I just wasn't that into it.
It was something fun to do for a while, but I didn't have that kind of passion and I didn't
like that.
It was so looks motivated and I saw people being successful who had the right look or
the right connections or they were the kid, a child of somebody.
And I just thought it was bullshit.
This is acting like I'm not trying to knock it, but being an actor or an actress is not
the same as being a brain surgeon or being a writer or being somebody that you're copying
something else.
I don't find that I don't really understand why.
I mean, it's entertainment and it's great to be able to watch a movie, but I don't really
put that stuff on a pedestal.
And that's why I kind of walked away from it because I thought I want to live a real
life.
I don't want to live somebody else's life and getting the best seat in a restaurant.
We talked about this before, celebrity culture, I really disdain.
So I don't care about it.
But as far as photography goes, it's kind of the same.
It's about connections.
It's about how your pictures look.
It's about how you are.
There's so much BS in anything to do with the arts.
It's very hard to just be really brilliantly talented and that's not enough to get you
anywhere.
It's really not.
It is if you fit in with someone's...
I think it's sort of the arts are run by little sororities and little fraternities and you
have to sort of be accepted by one or you have to fit in somehow.
The people that are in it don't see it that way, but it's a very entitled, clickish kind
of group.
And it's also extremely competitive.
Very, very competitive.
And I think that's just the way the arts are for a lot of people.
It's interesting because being in that space for a bit and then ultimately staying in it
for a long time on the stunt side, you'd hear people say, it's who you know, this is the
problem.
But then you go to the fire service and depending on the fire department, I've watched and luckily
I would test it for this one department and I was number one on the list.
And then a seemingly very fast process ground to a halt.
And then they had to redo the list and I was luckily still number one, but I found out
after the fact that someone who was the son of the previous chief didn't make the list
the first time, but magically made the list the second time.
So even in my own profession, it's all the professions really.
But yeah, I think especially that superficial judgment that is modeling, acting, I mean,
God, crippling sometimes because like you said, you could walk in with the most amazing
skill set and someone look at you and go, no, you're being judged.
And I think it takes a very specific kind of personality to be able to shrug off those,
especially, they might end up being very successful, but that journey can be brutal.
It can be.
The other thing is too, I think having someone in your corner, a famous person or someone
who's really influential in your field, that really helps.
In photography, I'm not an expert on how people get ahead, but a lot of them seem to be interns
for a paper or that's how they get into the paper.
Not always the best people are getting the most jobs in photography.
It's definitely an issue.
My work is really idiosyncratic, but I'm having a lot of trouble breaking into a certain sphere
because of my style.
So I'm not part of that sorority and it seems to be kind of a sorority.
And I can't kind of fight the current ideology in corporate media right now is not to present
really gritty, realistic pictures of life in America.
So I get published in Europe, but it's very tough.
I just had a conversation with someone at Reuters, one of the head people at Reuters,
and I don't think she liked my work.
She was very nice.
We had a meeting and I got no...
I mean, I am relatively used to people saying to me that they really like my work or it's
this or it's that.
They usually have something good to say.
They may not like all of it, but this woman had nothing good to say.
She does want to see more of it as I do it to send it to her, but she didn't like my
work and she explained, I don't think she did.
She explained to me that in the United States, it's very hard to sell work that's very realistic,
even though it's very powerful.
I think she thought my work was powerful and that I was very good at creating a narrative
and creating empathy, but I wasn't sure that she liked it.
But she said that she can't sell in this marketplace work that's rough or gritty because they sanitize
the news.
That was her words.
I use that word, but she used it.
And I've been in close contact with some editors who they just can't tolerate realism like
I do in this country.
But these are editors that publish extremely graphic images of the Ukraine and dead people,
Ukrainian dead people, dead people in body bags, dead hands, dead eyes peeking out of
body bags, dead families in the middle of the street.
Really a lot of death, a lot of graphic death, but that situation happened a far away.
And it was a political situation that our country wanted the population to be behind.
They wanted us to see those pictures because they wanted us to support that war.
But when you're talking about pictures of a population in this country, whether it's
drug addiction or poverty struck populations in North Philadelphia, these editors do not
want to publish it because in their words, they have to be careful about how bodies are
shown and how certain populations are shown.
And this was said to me flat out because they don't want to make situations worse.
But what's happening is, is they're hiding from the public what's really happening.
You have editors who in a way their feet don't touch the ground.
They have a certain aesthetic.
They have an education level.
They may not have ever been through anything in their lives that was really problematic.
And they are deciding what you see and what you hear and what stories you get, what images
you see.
There are people in the United States that have no idea that North Philadelphia or parts
of New York City look the way they do because you won't see it in the New York Times.
You won't see it in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
You won't see it in any of these papers.
The San Francisco Chronicle does have some realistic images of the drug issue.
They're supporting that.
But a lot of work that's really realistic, social realism like I do is very tough to
get seen in the United States because we are, I guess, maybe a bit too arrogant.
We don't want to look at it.
And we say it's exploitative, but we don't call it exploitation when it's starving people
from Africa or dead people from Ukraine or what's happening in Gaza right now, I could
talk endlessly about.
You're not really seeing images in corporate media of what it really looks like in Gaza.
You're seeing images of what it really looks like in Gaza on social media.
People are turning.
There was just a real study released.
I don't know who did it, but it was a real study about how, and I've been saying this,
I'm writing a blog post about it.
People are turning to social media like Telegram and Instagram and TikTok to get news because
they really want to see what's going on.
People want to see what's really happening.
So they're turning to these platforms and they think they're seeing what's really happening,
but they're really not getting the whole story because a lot of these people that they're
getting their information from aren't necessarily real journalists.
They're not really approaching it from a journalistic set of principles and protocols.
So they're getting what they think is news, but it isn't always.
And they're turning away from corporate media.
Well, adding to that perspective of allowing images from foreign countries to come in,
but not our own, that really reminds me of a lot of the conversations I've had on human
trafficking with some of the experts.
And that film came out a few months ago and everyone was like, oh my God, it's the most
amazing thing.
But it was firstly, I've heard since, it may not be as pure as the driven snow as people
originally thought behind it, but also it was kind of like this one man's heroism kind
of story where the real danger in the world of human trafficking is our own children on
these streets and the predators that are preying upon them to get them into prostitution and
some of the other things through their own devices.
This isn't South America.
This is an American problem.
And again, it's not even about doom and gloom.
Most of our neighborhoods are very safe.
Most of our fellow community members are great people.
But if all we do is point over the fence and say, oh my God, it's terrible over there and
ignore what's happening here, then firstly, people are suffering needlessly because we're
not paying attention.
But secondly, we're sticking our head in the sand and that's only going to get worse.
So it's important that I think it's powerful that we see these Instagram videos and I do.
I follow a lot of different groups around the world and it's very graphic, but that's
what's happening.
This is the horror of war.
This is the horror of famine and whatever.
But we also need the same lens to be on our homelessness, on the opioid epidemic, on the
obesity crisis, on the gang issues, all these things.
If we're going to be raw overseas, I agree 100%.
We need to have the same raw perspective on our own streets so it moves us.
We don't.
You have to understand the whole woke mentality, which I'm very against.
I'm not against equality.
This has nothing to do with equality.
I'm against cancel culture and this wokeism thing because what's happening is there are
people who subscribe to that and those people are in charge of visuals on newspapers.
They're terrified of getting blowback.
They're afraid of getting blowback.
They also don't want to show certain communities in a way that will make them...
They're afraid that they'll be looked down on because maybe...
I have my thoughts about this, but what they're really doing is they're hiding whole communities
of people, vibrant communities of people and not...
It's like they don't exist.
You cannot see images of certain neighborhoods the way they really look in corporate media
at all.
They don't show it at all.
One editor said to me that they have to be very careful how they show certain bodies
because they don't want to make problems worse.
But what they're really doing is they're saying that those people aren't good enough.
They're actually saying that they need to be hidden.
Do you know what I'm saying?
I'm saying that I feel that...I've said this many times, it's a mosaic and all of the colors
and all of the shapes, everything needs to be included.
We're living in a society now where we have elitist people who are making decisions about
everything you see and hear and read.
A lot of them are afraid of blowback.
Harm reduction will eviscerate the Philadelphia Inquirer if they run my pictures.
They will not run my pictures because they're terrified.
That's the truth.
I have had a couple of meetings there and they don't want to show what it really looks
like.
Still, you have a tepid photography program at this paper and you have people that could
have won Pulitzer Prizes for journalism in Kensington who have literally just not done
anything in all the years that Kensington's been sitting there, literally as a crow flies
a mile and a half away from the main office of this newspaper.
They won't touch it.
I have many, many images that are much easier on the eyes than some of my harshest ones.
But we're living in a place now where I can't really figure out what it is that is driving
these people.
Anything coming from the US, it has to have a very, I call it photographic euphemism.
It's sort of like mannerism, the style of art that's very pretentious and light and
even presenting heavy subjects like dignity photography.
You send a photographer into a neighborhood and they do this posed portrait in front of
a whatever, but they don't go into the projects.
They don't go into the hallways.
They don't show how people are living.
They don't show anything about what it's really like to live in some of these areas because
you have publications that don't want to show it.
They don't want to...
I'm not really sure.
I can't really even speak freely about it.
It's really sad and it's really unfair ultimately to the people who are living in these areas
because their stories aren't being effectively told.
They're not being told at all because you have a group of people who are curating, strictly
curating everything you see.
I just did a thing on anti-Semitism and put it on Instagram.
And I'm kind of shadow banned on Instagram.
So I've been for a while.
Now it's worse because I interact with all these accounts from Gaza and a lot of them
are in trouble.
But anyway, I did this story about this old Jewish guy, this rabbi who was attacked, almost
attacked on the street.
I photographed the whole thing.
And that's a story that New York should be talking about.
But you can't get these rough real life stories out there.
I think people really want that.
That's why they're turning to Instagram, to these bloody videos of people coming out of
these bombed out houses in Gaza.
Because people want to know what the hell's going on.
They don't want to turn on CNN and have somebody say, gloss over the truth.
They want to know what's going on.
And so I think our publications are going to have to catch up to that because people
are starting to not take them seriously at all.
And one of the problems that's happening, especially with anti-Semitism right now, is
you have a lot of half truths out there and a lot of misinformation.
And people need to have accurately sourced and vetted information sources along with
those rough images.
And they're not getting that.
They're just getting rough video, but they're not getting much else.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
The context.
Right.
They're not getting the full context.
And so it's kind of like little kids looking at pornography and just seeing the pictures.
They have no idea that there's actually something wonderful that can come of sex.
They're just seeing pornography.
And that's kind of what, in a way, what a lot of the visuals are that are coming out
about this war.
It's sort of like death pornography in a way.
And it's designed to get people to feel a certain way.
But it's not really...
A lot of those people in Gaza aren't really telling real stories about people following
them around.
What are their experiences?
Every day, it's just a lot of the glorious parts of death to get people to look.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you talked about starting off drawing, well, acting then drawing, and then you said
you found photography.
Walk me through how you found photography, and then let's go to how you got to Kensington
and started taking pictures that you're now known for.
So I found photography on a trip to Europe.
We were really poor, and we basically still are pretty poor.
And I saved for a trip to Europe when my son was 11.
And we went for six weeks, and I started taking iPhone pictures in Bruges, Belgium, and then
in Venice, and then in Perugia.
And I didn't know what I was doing, but I was good at it, these iPhone pictures.
And I found myself chasing Roman, Romany people, they call them gypsies, but you're not supposed
to.
They're very interesting populations in Italy, and I was just chasing them around with my
iPhone.
And I remember Googling it and finding street photography, and then it all clicked with
all these photography books my dad had.
We always had a lot of books.
We had thousands of books.
I told you I read a lot.
So I had been exposed to a lot of old photography as a child, and I guess it was in the back
of my mind, buried.
And when I discovered all this, it was turning a corner, and it was like a blinding light.
It was literally a near-death experience of the light and God.
It was really like finding photography was like that.
My life was one way before that trip, and when I came back, I bought a camera, and I
just started learning to use a camera.
I had a Fujifilm X-T1, and I found Skid Row.
I'm kind of synopsizing.
I found downtown Los Angeles and beach culture in California, and I was doing kind of these
lighthearted street pictures, and I was really good at it.
I had a lot of bad pictures.
I had a lot of awful pictures, like literally just people milling around, like just nothing.
But then I'd have a real gem.
Like I had an eye, but I just needed to learn how to distill it and how to use the camera
and use light and all this stuff.
When I first started taking pictures, I could make a great composition.
It was more of a social composition.
I was very good at telling a story in the picture, but I didn't really know how to use
light or f-stop.
I wasn't really taking pictures that were photographically expert or anything.
As I progressed, I started doing a lot more of that, really, really good photography,
like technically.
I don't do as much of that in Kensington.
It's more my compositional and narrative skills that come into play and some creativity, but
not as much as I can manage in New York being creative here.
It's just not really appropriate with Kensington.
But I started photographing in Skid Row and doing these kind of character sketches with
people.
Skid Row's changed a lot.
LA's changed a lot.
If you go on my website and look at my Los Angeles street photography, it's black and
white.
Then my Skid Row pictures, there's a lot of great characters and great moments that aren't
really there anymore because gentrification.
Photography is like you're photographing a time.
It's like a trend, a fashion, like bell bottoms in the 70s.
When I photographed downtown LA, that was the way it was at the time I photographed
it, but it's not like that anymore.
That's why street photography is so important because it chronicles times and it preserves
characters and places and people and ideas and the zeitgeist of the time.
I wound up losing my apartment in California because I couldn't pay for it.
We moved to Europe to save money.
We went to Turkey and France, me and my son.
When we got back on our feet, we came to New York City and I needed to get some services
for my son who was really struggling with some issues.
I think that I became a really good photographer in New York.
That's when I really began to learn how to do pictures because I didn't find the content
in New York that I had in LA.
There wasn't Skid Row in downtown LA and these wonderful characters.
In New York, I had to work harder to get it interesting to me.
I did multiple exposures, in-camera multiple exposures.
I met certain people and I did some photo essays and long-term series of images with
certain people.
I really developed as a photographer and I think my best photography is in New York.
A lot of people still love that Skid Row in LA stuff, but a lot of people that know of
me now don't even know I did anything in LA.
I came to Kensington.
I'd been in New York for a long time and it was getting old being in New York.
I was really tired of being in the city and I was tired of the grind.
I photographed New York so extensively that I was just done.
Also, I had COVID and it changed me.
I wasn't really feeling well.
I had long COVID.
I just had been wanting to photograph Kensington for a while and I saw some videos of Kensington.
I was like, my God, it's possible to do some serious art here that will also tell a story
that needs to be told effectively because it's never been told effectively.
There was one other photographer that went in there a few years ago and did some really
great portraits and got a lot of attention for it, but he didn't do street photography
and he didn't show what the place looked like.
He did portraits, which were good, but I wanted to do something that hadn't been done before.
I wanted to make a portrait of a neighborhood.
I visited Kensington a bunch of times and I just had to do it like it was a calling.
I had to relocate.
I had to leave New York.
I had to buy a car, a crappy car, and I basically just left my life behind to do this thing
in Kensington.
To do Kensington, you have to be a raw social realist.
Either that or you're going to come here and you're going to ask to do a nice portrait
and get a story and make a recording of the person's story and take their picture.
That's bullshit.
I've gotten a lot of blowback for the work in Kensington from harm reduction, from communist
groups, from I'm an exploiter, I'm this, I'm that, I'm a Jew.
I've gotten a lot of really bad messages on social media, but in order to do a profile
of any place, it has to be real.
You have to see people what it looks like.
I try to do it artistically and sometimes people's backs are turned.
I'll do pictures where you can't really see their faces and sometimes you can see their
faces.
It's about documenting an American phenomenon effectively.
That means that you're going to do it and you're going to photograph the people who
are suffering with addiction.
You're going to photograph the families in the neighborhood.
You're going to photograph the neighborhood.
You're going to photograph animals.
I do all of it.
A lot of people now just, it's easy enough for people to say you're being exploitative
or you're being, oh, this is just gross and disgusting.
That's what it looks like.
I did a whole series on Trank.
I showed what it really looks like.
What do Trank ones look like?
What do the EMS people see when they pick these people up?
You have major newspapers sending people in to do these stories and the pictures mostly
suck or they just show no context.
You have a photographer in there that's completely overwhelmed, afraid, doesn't know how to talk
to people to get, they're just out of their element.
In order to do Kensington right, you have to be really committed to it and you have
to be willing to take risks and you have to be a little bit stupid sometimes.
Well, speaking of Trank, that's a somewhat new drug compared to heroin and some of the
other ones that we've seen for a few decades now.
You've got a unique lens, no pun intended, as far as some of the more desperate areas
that you've filmed.
What have you seen timeline wise as far as the introduction of Trank and the impact it's
having on a lot of these addicts that you're seeing?
I wasn't here for the introduction of Trank.
Trank first started being seen I think around, I don't know, maybe 2010.
I'm not really sure.
But it's now in the drug supply of fentanyl and fentanyl is actually spiking a lot of
different things.
It isn't just people wanting to get an opioid high.
But Trank has destroyed these people.
It has destroyed them.
It is not only causing wounds, but it's also causing internal damage.
I believe it's causing, and I'm a lay person.
I'm not a physician, but I can see in these young people certain physical characteristics
that they all seem to have.
And I also have watched over a year now.
It's been over a year that I've been here and I've watched people deteriorate, deteriorate.
There's only one person has improved that I've photographed.
She got clean.
I believe she got clean.
I was told she got clean.
The rest of them are so bad, I can't photograph them.
There is a few that got clean probably that I haven't seen.
I don't know for sure.
Some of them could have died.
I stayed out of there for a long time and I've been going back.
I'm doing different kinds of work now, kind of more still life, more scenes.
Getting ready to do another project probably out of possibly out of the country.
I'm not sure, but every one of them has gotten catastrophically worse and they're all supported
by harm reduction groups who are just making it easy for them to stay there.
And it's so awful that I can't photograph them anymore.
The people that appear on my website, and I have a publication with Stern coming out.
They're finally going to publish it.
All the people in those pictures have gotten so much worse since those pictures were done.
They get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
They don't get better.
Some of them are so bad now I can't photograph them.
I mean I could, but I don't know what kind of meaning the picture would have because
in a normal society where we were mature, the pictures would have meaning.
You would see how they looked when I started and how they look now and you would say, wow,
this drug problem in this country is really a big fucking problem and we need to really
get a handle on it.
We're giving billions of dollars for wars for Ukraine and for Israel, but we need to
take that money out of that military budget and put it towards our own country and figure
out what the fuck is going on with these drugs and get it taken care of and get these dealers
off the street once and for all.
Forget wokeism, get them the hell off the street.
I am thinking that if we had a more mature society and a better set of people working
on publications in this country who actually were motivated and who were driven by the
need to educate and show what's really going on instead of whatever bullshit political
agendas they have and trying elitist mentality, you'd want to see all the pictures.
You'd want to see how does this person look now?
But if I take that picture of how they look now, it's viewed as an exploitation and it's
also so bad because taking the picture falls on deaf ears here because all their humanity
matters from where they started out when I photographed them initially to where they
are now.
I mean, I photographed a couple of people in their worst moments like Bethany in New
York City.
She's transgender and I've been photographing her for years.
But a lot of people, they don't want to see what are the real results of drugs and mental
illness and neglect and all these other things.
People wind up in a very, very, very deteriorated state.
And I think it's important to see that.
I don't know that it should be put on social media in their worst state unless that person's
okay with it.
A lot of my worst pictures I don't have on there.
And believe it or not, some of my worst pictures have gone to people's parents who wanted them
and who are grateful for them because they wanted to see what their kids are now and
they were so happy to have these pictures.
Their kids sent them.
Like I show them their pictures and I send them to their parents right on the street
with them.
And they're rough pictures.
But you have a situation where we don't have an atmosphere that's conducive to seeing all
that reality.
It's being hidden.
In Kensington, I feel like you just have to go for it all.
The thing about Trank that's so scary, when you talk about the before and after shots,
I think of the faces of meth, they call it.
I think they were all mugshots, but it was a side by side.
But it is.
It shows the absolute deterioration.
You look at this and go, oh my God, how horrific.
The skeletons, they got no teeth.
I mean, it's awful.
But the problem is a lot of the drugs that we run on out there don't devastate the human
body and then kill someone quickly.
Cocaine is your septum starts deteriorating.
You're going to have cardiac issues.
Heroin, depending on if you're eating, you may lose some weight.
But ultimately, if you don't take too much, you're going to carry on breathing.
You're not going to have some horrendous, grotesque health issues with it.
Alcoholism, you can drink yourself to death, but it's going to take decades and decades.
But meth before and then now, you know, tranc.
I mean, the devastating impact on the actual human body, and especially tranc, these open
wounds.
I mean, it's so, so sad.
And seeing something deteriorate a human being so rapidly needs to be front and center because
these are our brothers and sisters.
These were kids that once we were playing with in a kindergarten somewhere.
And now we're working in the city and this person's living under a bridge rotting literally.
So I think that, you know, that we're pushing against something that I observed years ago,
which is you can watch an action film on old American cable television and Rambo will slaughter,
you know, 100 Viet Cong.
But then a woman's nipple will be blurred out.
You know, we've got such a bizarre kind of.
That's exactly right.
So we can look at pictures of flayed children on Instagram, but we can't show a nipple.
Right.
And I can't show what it really looks like to have a tranquil on Instagram.
If I show that, you know, I mean, these tranquil ones are really, really bad.
They're almost like war wounds.
Some of them are so bad, you'd be shocked.
They are like war wounds.
They're unbelievably bad.
I have something on my website that I'm not going to put on Instagram.
You know, there are limits to what can go on Instagram, but I think that it's so important
to show what people are going through.
You know, in Kensington, you know, people are out in public doing this stuff.
They're being filmed by YouTubers.
And that's a real issue.
I was just looking at some YouTube videos yesterday because I wanted to see if certain
people were still alive because I can't find them.
I've been driving.
I can't find them.
I don't want to walk on the street right now and ask around.
I'm not, I've done this now for so long that I've, I'm just not, I hate to say this.
I'm not interested in interacting right now.
It's been so difficult.
I've been exposed to so much fentanyl, you know, a lot of fentanyl smoke, a lot of stuff
on me, you know, I've been in some very dangerous situations and I, I've created a pretty extensive
body of work there and I don't know how much more I can add to it.
And I don't feel the compulsion to do it in that way right now.
But I really want to know what's happened to some people.
And the other issue for me is because of the time of year it's cold, they're burning fires
and I have asthma and the fires they burn are wood and plastic and detritus and it's
so noxious.
I mean, you'll have people passed out around a fire that's got so much black smoke and
I can't tolerate that.
I'll get really sick.
So in the winter it's, it's really hard for me to hang out.
And in Philadelphia, in Kensington, you actually see bonfires on the street.
It's unbelievable.
It's like a neighborhood that the city just decided to just say, do whatever the fuck
you want.
We don't care.
We don't care about the neighbors.
We don't care about the kids that live in the neighborhood that they're getting exposed
to this awful smoke, these drug dealers build bonfires in these neighborhoods, burning plastic
and car seats and all kinds of crap.
And they're so out of it.
Some of them, they're not understanding what they're doing to themselves, but they're also
doing it to the neighborhood and nobody does anything about it.
They're allowed to do whatever they want.
If you set a fire in my neighborhood, you get arrested.
But I think it's really important to photograph all this stuff, but I'm doing it, you know,
but in the meantime, I don't know what's happened to some of the people I've photographed.
So I went and I looked on YouTube, recent YouTube to see if I could find any of them,
you know, cause I can't find them.
I've been looking and looking and I don't know if they're dead or they just moved on.
There's just a few of them that I can't find.
And I also found myself in a weird situation, you know, I was very uncomfortable in and
I decided to pull away from it.
I didn't, didn't like what I was seeing.
A lot of the people that are out on the street there, they're not just victims of drug abuse,
like of addiction.
It's not like you can look at it and say they're victims.
They've been abused.
They're traumatized.
Many of them are, but they're also victimizing each other.
They're victimizing the neighborhood.
There are businesses like dozens that have had to close because of theft.
There are drug dealers out there.
Whatever they went through in their childhood and whatever social ills have, whatever, they're
still destroying the neighborhood.
They're viciously abusing a lot of the people who are addicted.
There is this very strong culture of abuse that runs through Kensington and I've written
about it and talked about it.
And Philadelphia, the media here has completely abrogated their responsibilities.
They don't talk about it.
They don't try to find out what's going on.
They're clueless.
They don't know.
They don't want to know and they're terrified to tell the stories for their own politically
correct motivations.
I can't figure out what happened to journalism in the United States, but in Philly there
is no journalism.
So you have a neighborhood that's literally on fire.
Trank is a component of fentanyl.
It's fentanyl and they mix trank in there to extend it and to get people really fucked
up and whatever.
They want to get them high really quickly.
They don't want it to last too long and they want them to be able to afford it and they
want to make money off of them.
But a lot of these people I found that I photographed were doing really bad things.
So I've told stories of theirs that I thought were important and that needed to be heard,
but there's also another side to the story about what a lot of them have done to each
other, to family members, tried to do to me, done to other photographers.
There's a lot of things I can't talk about.
But I've done a lot of pictures of people and you have to believe in them in some respects.
You want to illuminate the problem, but right now I'm illuminating a neighborhood.
I'm still sort of doing it.
But I found that there's a lot of reasons why people are on the street and there's a
lot of criminal activity going on.
They get victimized and they get treated very poorly and very abused.
They're very abused a lot of them.
But there's a lot of things that they do to their family and friends and it's not just
a group of people who should be coddled and pitied.
There's people taking advantage.
There's people lying.
There's people setting other people up.
There's people doing...
It's very difficult not to unravel.
I'm always curious about solutions, especially from people who have traveled.
For example, I went to Portugal.
My family moved to Portugal a long time ago and I sat with the man who spearheaded decriminalization
of addiction in Portugal.
It doesn't mean you can go into shops and buy it.
It's the addicts are brought in.
They're educated on resources.
They put a huge amount of money into mental health counseling, addiction counseling, job
creation.
Yes.
To me, that's one of the problems that we have with the addiction crisis here is that
to feed your addiction in America, you've got to go to the underworld because we've
stigmatized addiction.
With you traveling around the world, are there any other things that you've seen somewhere
else that works well or at least other perspectives on this issue that you yourself are seeing
through the lens of your camera that you think if we tried a different philosophy in this
country, maybe we could make a dent at the nucleus of addiction, not shuffling them off
to another jurisdiction so that that neighborhood can forget about it, but actually addressing
the root cause of why so many people are on the streets and therefore, as you just described,
that kind of moral spiral downwards as addiction so often pulls people through?
After seeing what I've seen, I have a really conservative outlook on what I think.
There's a lot of far left.
I never understood what far left meant and moderate conservatives and conservative.
I am not a far left person.
I do not believe that I think the far left has got control of Kensington in a lot of
ways.
I believe that harm reduction is a science and it's a medical protocol and that's important,
but harm reduction in Kensington and harm reduction on the street a lot of times is
getting people rehab.
They can help get them rehab.
They give them needles.
They give them clean paraphernalia to use, crack pipes, meth pipes, chapstick, anything
you need to keep you comfortable while you're getting high except the drug itself, clothes,
food, wound care.
Harm reduction is harming a lot of people in my opinion.
I think that the only way to get this in hand in Kensington and generally is to provide
clean needles because you need to do that, provide wound care, get them into hospitals
if they're willing to go, get them into rehab and that's it.
No food, no clothes, no place to go to take a shower, no place to go to get your hair
cut, mobile haircut, no donations because they come to Kensington knowing they can get
high for $5 bags.
They come to Kensington knowing they can boost which is shoplifting in the neighborhood.
They come to Kensington knowing harm reduction is there.
We'll provide them with food, with clothes, with everything they need to get high.
They can go in and get a shower.
A lot of these harm reductions play favorites.
Some of the harm reductions play favorites.
There's one in particular which I won't name which gave me a really hard time.
They're really, really awful and they play, I hear horrible things about some of them
from people on the street who can't stand them but they need them.
They need the needles.
They need the clothes.
They need to use the bathroom but there's all kinds of issues with harm reduction.
There's all kinds of weird situations that can grow up with people in harm reduction
who themselves are really in need of therapy, some of them.
But if you didn't have any of these things, you wouldn't have kids from the suburbs taking
an Uber to get to Kensington to go on a bender and die on the street.
If there was nothing there, man, nothing there but the basic thing, we're going to take care
of your tracheal wound.
We're going to send you to the hospital.
We're going to give you needles because we don't want to risk needle borne illnesses.
We will do the bare minimum but there is no soup here.
There is no crackers.
There are no muffins.
There's no clean clothes.
There is no church group coming on Saturday to give a beautiful meal and a sermon.
Nothing.
You're going to have a whole lot of people rethink whether or not they're going to go
on a bender in Kensington because they go on a bender and they never go home.
I talk to many, many people who have a home who are on the street in Kensington and they
used to go on the weekends and then they were there a few days a week and then they're there
five days a week and then now they're living there because their family won't take them
back because they're a mess.
They're dirty.
They've got a wound.
They're stealing the TV.
So when I first got there, I was volunteering with harm reduction.
Then they began to realize that I was photographing realistically and they rejected me.
They were like, oh, we, they started to get mean and weird and I was like, fuck you.
I don't want to deal with these people because they're almost like a cult because for some
of the harm reduction people, it's their thing.
You know, like you raise puppies or you, you save animals.
Every Saturday they have a place to go.
They have a habit of giving out all this food.
They go and there's some really good people involved.
They really, really want to help, but they're misguided because they're keeping these people
there.
You have to do everything in your power to tell them this is a shit life.
This neighborhood sucks.
There's nothing good to eat here.
You're going to get your ass kicked.
People should not be allowed to inject on the street.
They should not be allowed to burn fires on the street.
The drug dealers should not be allowed to terrorize a corner.
They should not be allowed to terrorize me if I get out of my car.
I have to ask permission.
They should not be allowed to stand there with guns.
There needs to be real policing, effective policing, effective city leadership in all
cities in the United States where we have this problem.
But harm reduction as practiced on the streets is the biggest problem.
And people need to sit down together and get a plan and tell these church groups, everybody
don't come down here.
Let them suffer and they will go into rehab or they will die.
But if they're not going to go into rehab, they're not going to do it anyway.
You're prolonging the agony and you're destroying the neighborhood by enabling this behavior.
And that is a hard statement to make because a lot of people disagree with it and I will
get totally, a lot of addicts actually agree with me.
They've said, for my stern piece, the interviewer, they've said to him, they're enabling us
to be here.
Well, I think as you've described as well, for that moment, you're making it more comfortable,
but you're not getting to the root cause.
You're not addressing the addiction.
You're not addressing the mental health.
Again, not all of them, a lot of them are going to have trauma.
And if not initially, then certainly after years of being an addict, you're not going
to have the path that leads to a roof over your head and a job and all the tools that
a functioning member of a community needs.
So and I've said this, I've had people kind of push back on the prohibition conversation
and they tried it in wherever Seattle, they didn't.
They legalized marijuana.
That's not removing drug prohibition for an addict.
Now I'm not talking about smugglers and sellers.
Those get the full fucking force of the law in Portugal, for example.
But the addict who's just simply doing whatever it is to get their next hit, that's the one
where you're not going to get all of them, but a large portion, if you tell them, look,
you're not going to get arrested and we have got these resources and this is what we didn't
do in America.
We didn't take the money from the war on drugs and put it into proactive solutions.
We just changed laws and put almost nothing to support it.
So I understand where you're coming from because it is a form of enabling when we're not doing
anything to address the root cause.
It's the same as modern medicine at the moment, chronic disease medicine in America.
Like you've got hypertension.
All right, here's a bunch of pills.
I haven't told you to change the way you eat.
Haven't told you exercise.
That's exactly right.
I told you you're going to be on those statins for the rest of your life or whatever drug
you're on.
There's a lot of old people who are on cholesterol lowering medication, blood pressure lowering
medication.
They're eating the worst food.
But my cholesterol is 110.
I'm like, no, you could still give yourself colorectal cancer.
You could still give yourself all kinds of other illnesses from eating this crap just
because your cholesterol is low doesn't mean that the whole problem.
That's the whole problem.
You have people that I get what you're saying, but you know, it's very hard.
A lot of parents down there, there's people down there that are in such rough shape.
They can't get a job and they can't boost because they can't go into a store.
Nobody will let them go in.
I mean, they're like covered in pus.
There are people covered in pus from their tranquil.
I have photos of a couple of people.
That's the reality.
It is not uncommon for them to be covered in pus.
How are they going to get money for drugs?
How they have cash app.
They might have to borrow somebody's phone and they, they text or call their parents
and their parents throw $15 into cash app or $20 and that's how they get high.
And I've made phone calls to people's parents.
Can I use your phone?
I always let them use my phone and the parent sounds really devastated or really tired or
really fed up and like, why are you calling me?
I don't want to give you money for this.
Sometimes they won't answer.
Call many parents, half don't answer.
Okay.
And then, you know, they'll have to use somebody's phone for the cash app.
So they'll use, you know, one guy used a drug dealer's phone and drug dealers right there.
And so the mother sent the drug dealer $15 for her son, but the drug dealer kept five
for himself and gave the son $10 to get high.
There's another racket.
People don't know they're enabling this, but young women will call their family and tell
them that they're being beaten.
Like they'll be with guys, they'll FaceTime them and a guy will be beating them supposedly
and they will extort money from a family member.
The guy will say, give me 200 or $300 or I'm going to beat the shit out of your daughter
right now.
And they extort money.
I know people that that's happened to.
And I've listened to parents tell me that it happened.
And they didn't know that it's a scam, that other people have done it.
And it's a thing.
You know what I mean?
You can't tell a parent, well, that that's a scam.
You know what I mean?
That's they get one or two guys and they're all in on it and they all get the money and
they all go get tons of drugs.
So there's different ways that people are enabled.
You know, when my son was really involved in drugs, he's not anymore.
He's been clean for a year, but I gave him $20 a day.
He told me it was for food.
Sometimes it was 15.
I knew it was drugs, but I had to give him money for food.
He was not, he was living in a, a special home for youth who had problems.
I threw him out because he was really, really, really, really abusive and stealing.
But I enabled it.
He was using a lot of that money for drugs.
You know, it's really hard when you know your kid is thin or they don't have any money,
even if your kid is a real, real shit head, it's really hard to walk away from your kid
to have your kid call and say, mom, I'm really dope sick.
You know, they're calling their mom in front of me.
I'm dope sick.
Mom, please.
I don't want to do a date.
I had a girl do this.
Mom, please.
If you don't give me money, I'm going to have to do a date.
A date is prostitution and in Kensington is walking up and down the street looking not
real great and having some loser pick you up.
I'm sorry.
Some of these girls are in horrible condition and these guys pick them up.
It's God knows what's going on there.
There are some girls that are very attractive, but that's uncommon.
A lot of them are not in good shape.
I photographed a good handful of them who have really deteriorated.
So the daughter will say, mom, I don't want to do a date, mom, you know what happened?
My friend, this guy beat her in the head and then they raped her.
Mom, I don't want to do a date.
I don't want to do a date.
I don't want to get raped and they don't, but they're pulling this on their mom and
their mom saying, no, I can't give you money.
You're going to use it.
I can't do it.
And then they wear them down and I'm standing there holding the phone.
They wear them down and they're like, all right, I'll give you $30 and they send it
to cash app.
The call closes off and the girl literally walks away from me.
Doesn't say thank you.
Nothing.
Just like it never happened.
She just goes off to retrieve the money.
Obviously, that's the absolute desperation that's going on.
As far as hope though, have there been any people that you met during their addiction,
during their homelessness that managed to find their way out?
There would be, I guess, a quote unquote success story.
I have not met anyone.
I have heard of someone who got clean, supposedly Lily with the dark hair.
I photographed her a couple of times.
I heard that she got clean and then somebody said that she came back out on the street
and OD'd five times in a row and then I haven't seen her.
I think she probably came back, OD'd a bunch of times and then got off the street again.
I have not seen her.
Otherwise, I'm sure somebody's gotten clean.
But of the people that I photographed, there's only one story and that is the very first
people I photographed in 2018.
I came to Kensington.
I never really went into Kensington, but I went into the outskirts, kind of where Fishtown
and Aramingo Avenue before it gets into Kensington, it's kind of like an out of the way area.
A lot of people panhandle on the highway.
What are you doing?
A lot of people panhandle on the highway.
I found this amazing couple, Katie and Mike.
She was really cute, a really cute thin girl and they were addicted and they were very
young and I photographed them.
And then I lost touch with them.
We called a few times and I lost touch.
I came to Kensington five years, four years later to do these pictures and this girl pulled
up in a car.
I didn't recognize her.
Some plump woman, young woman said, hey, I'm Katie.
And I'm like, who the fuck are you?
What the fuck is this woman is?
She was so different.
Her and Mike got clean and they have an apartment in Kensington.
They're living in Kensington because it's all they can afford.
It's what they can do.
But they're both clean.
They stayed clean and they look so different, completely different.
That's the only thing I can think of.
That was before Trank.
They got clean before Trank.
So now I think it's so much more difficult for people to get clean.
And when you're loaded with Trank wounds, you're less motivated because it's just also
terribly negative.
You have this wound that may or may not be infected.
You have all kinds of health considerations from the wound.
I think it's terribly defeating.
It's yet another aspect of addiction that has to be managed and it can be very overwhelming.
And I think having Trank wounds makes it, you would think it would make it more likely
that they would get clean, that they'd be like, I got to get clean.
I got to get rid of this.
No, I think it makes it less likely because it's just so ugly and so debilitating and
they'll just let it go until they're amputated.
I saw a guy shooting into his amputation.
I have photographs of people shooting into their wounds.
So my dog is okay.
So he's a really dumb little two-year-old Morky.
I love him, but he's not very smart.
He does stupid.
Yeah, my dog.
But I think that the Trank wounds actually in a weird way make it less likely that people
are going to get clean.
Well, I can see them in that people are riddled usually, whether it's consciously or subconsciously
with guilt and shame.
That's a big part of addiction and then you have this physical manifestation that you're
now even more ashamed of.
So I could see how that would be a vicious circle.
That and also the wounds are so hard to manage.
It's so defeating and so depressing that I think people need all of the encouragement
in the world to get clean if their body's in perfect shape.
But if your body is falling apart, it is so much harder to be as positive and mentally
focused as you need to be to get clean and get off the streets.
So those Trank wounds are like anchors.
Yeah, I'm sure they hurt too.
So that probably draws you to more pain medication.
Yeah.
You'd be surprised how much they do with these wounds.
Like they hurt, but they're high a lot, I guess.
But I don't know what's going on.
I mean, these open wounds, I'm talking about massive wounds that are like all up and down
a leg, two legs.
Horrendous.
It is.
It's so bad.
I've seen wounds that were so bad that I mean, it's clear down to the bone, maggots, viscera,
tendons, ligaments, fat, muscle striation, the strata of the skin and the fat.
And I think when you reach that point, it's just real easy to say, this is over.
And they create a mess.
So I think that also creates issues for caregivers.
Like if they show up at rehab, some of the rehabs here, they're not very nice people
unless you have a lot of money to get into a good one.
And so you have staff that are insensitive.
And that's a problem for some of these places.
You have staff that are insensitive.
And some people say the rehabs are what you make them.
You have to be highly motivated.
But you could go in there with trachea wounds and people don't want to go near you.
They're not just going to be nice to you because you're in rehab.
You've got people, they view it as a job.
They're not there because they're psychiatric social workers.
They're there because they're just working there and they don't have the sensitivity
or the empathy.
That's a real issue for some of the rehabs.
So you could have a situation where somebody just doesn't want to bother with dealing with
all that trauma.
Yeah.
Well, you get compassion fatigue.
I see it in our community too.
If you've got someone working in that facility, this bright eyed and bushy tailed at the beginning.
And as you said, these desperate cases of people that you maybe early in your career
are hoping you're going to be the one that's going to help them turn the corner.
And then they come again and again and again, and they're getting worse and worse and worse.
I can see how there would be an emotional fatigue on the workers in the rehab too.
Yeah.
Well, I'm not talking about the people who work in the rehab who are necessarily nurses
and doctors and therapists.
I'm talking about the workers in the rehabs that aren't necessarily skilled nurses or
therapists.
Some of them aren't very nice.
They're really rough.
And some of the social workers aren't very good.
They don't really, they're just there.
They get a paycheck.
It takes a lot of work to be a social worker, to unearth a lot of programs for people to
make sure that they understand everything.
And not all of them see their job, take their job as seriously as they need to take it.
There's a lot of social services who are staffed by people who don't care.
They really don't care.
And that's another thing that's never talked about.
Yeah.
And it's a vicious circle there too, because the chances of someone overcoming an addiction
if they have a negative experience is diminished.
Same as a lot of the firefighters and police officers that I've had on the show that have
gone to see a counselor and it was the wrong counselor.
They burst into tears or they told them to get out.
They can't help them.
That one interaction can be devastating to someone in crisis.
Yes, it can be.
I'll tell you, doing this work has really catapulted me in, well, it's spiraled into
some real depression for me.
And I've had some really traumatic experiences out there with some people trying to rob me
or set me up or bad experiences with harm reduction, almost like creating a situation
where I got beaten up.
I've witnessed beatings.
I've witnessed people dying and stuff.
It's been very traumatic for me.
And the kinds of pictures I take, while they are narrative, some of them are real nice
narratives.
They have a flow and I try to do it artistically.
There's still pictures that the first responders would be used to seeing.
My pictures wouldn't freak the first responders out because that's what they see.
But the regular people that look at them, they're like, oh my God, get that away.
Because first responders, they see a part of people and humanity that other people don't
see.
They see the worst of us sometimes.
They see the best of us too, but they see these devastating situations that are really
hard to talk about with other people.
Because people, especially these days, they don't want to be brought down.
They don't want a downer.
You go to a party or you go to a dinner and you had some unbelievable experience on the
street as a first responder or me as a photographer.
I'm not a first responder.
I'm not responsible to save people's lives, but I am seeing this right up close, personal.
And I have done things to actually really help people.
And I've had to feed people and I've had to save people and get them help.
And I've had to do a lot of things that people don't know about behind the pictures.
So you have these experiences that other people find really distasteful.
You've seen things that other people are grossed out by.
You can't talk about it.
Well, this guy had this massive wound and he's pimping his girlfriend and his girlfriend
is no deed.
And there's all these crazy fucked up stories.
And it's hard to talk about it with regular civilian type people because a lot of people,
there are some people that have a lot of empathy and you can talk to, but a lot of them, they
don't want to hear it.
And then you just turn into this person that you're a downer or you're, stop being so negative.
Come on, be positive.
But you're seeing a part of life in a neighborhood where everything seems to be futile.
And I had this editor say to me at the New York Times, this woman I did not get along
with this conversation did not go well.
And I said to her, life in the United States needs to be portrayed as realistically as
what you portray in Ukraine.
And you need to use that protocol and the same standard instead of omitting and deleting
all this stuff from the narrative.
And she said, she thought the work was very powerful and very really good, but well, can't
you just go get some more hopeful images and put them in here and have hope?
Because we have to think about how the viewer is going to feel.
The viewer is going to be upset and traumatized and we have to think about that.
And I wrote to her later and I said, I can't insert false pictures of hope because the
story is the hopelessness of the whole situation.
And the fact that it's a dead end and that's the story you need to tell.
You can't go in there and I have hopeful pictures of the neighborhood of kids and I have all
kinds of pictures that I can make a nice edit with.
But you have a population of people, if you've been exposed to this kind of hardship and
trauma that simply doesn't want to hear it.
And they'll listen to it to a point and then it's time to get over it.
But you can't just get over it.
I can't imagine being an EMT.
I can't imagine responding to these calls every day.
You would just develop this out, I don't know how.
This is what needs to be heard and this is why I love these conversations.
The guests and the subjects, each interview that I do is so diverse and some are laughy
jokey and some are raw like this, but this also needs to be heard.
And the people listening to this, a lot of us are running on these people.
And I agree with you completely.
It's sad to me that there isn't really a voice for the fire service, for EMS in America.
You can name umpteen sports people that have a limelight or actors or singers, but the
voice of the first responder, I think it's a tragedy that it's not heard because we get
to see society how it really is.
And like you said, it's not all doom and gloom.
There's a lot of greatness.
Arguably, a majority of the people are doing pretty well.
So that's why we need to advocate for the ones who aren't.
And it's by this kind of storytelling that I think that we kind of pull those eyelids
open a little bit.
Now for people listening, where are the best places for people to see your work?
The website and social media.
It's Suzanne Stein.
If you Google me Suzanne Stein photographer, I'm on Instagram.
I have a blog.
There's some stuff written up about me, but you can find my website and my Instagram and
you know, I'll send you those links and you can put them in there and people can find
them.
Most of the rougher stuff is on my website.
It's really weird.
I do this really crazy rough kind of photography, but I have this really cute little dog and
I follow all these animals on Instagram and I have all these stuffed animals and you know,
I have this other part of me that's like really, you know, kind of this is my dog.
Beautiful.
He's silly.
You can see it kind of to offset all this trauma, but yeah, yeah, I'll give you those
links and, but I think there needs to be more of a dialogue with first responders and I
think people really need, we all really rely on first responders.
They're the most important people in our lives really when something's wrong, but we, we
really need to hear more, not just like some cops show, you know, I mean, somehow it would
be great to get that dialogue simultaneously.
It would be interesting with photography too, because they see life as it, as it really
is.
They see us how we are.
Absolutely.
Oh yeah.
That would be a beautiful fusion.
Actually it really would mean not, not beautiful, maybe aesthetically, but you know, it's very
important and you know, I'll tell you and I'll leave you with this and examining a lot
of photographs that are in media publications.
I've been doing a lot of that lately because I thought I wanted to break into doing that
kind of photography, but I can't cause my style is just, I look at it and it's very
polished and they can go to a place where it sucks and take these really polished pictures
and that's not what it looks like.
And so first responders see what it really looks like, but you can't see that anywhere
else.
It's really something that is not represented in media.
It's not represented.
It's hard to talk about.
People don't really, aren't always receptive.
So there really would be very interesting to have that fusion and really get it out
there because that's the lives that we're all really living, but we're acting like it's
not really real life.
It's sort of like that, that photographic euphemism is what's really out there.
Absolutely.
And it's kind of like a, it's like a hand clapping that are not connecting, what's really
out there and then what we're supposed to see, if that makes sense.
It does.
Well, we'll have to talk about that because I mean that maybe some narration from a first
responder couple with some of your pictures might be an interesting collaboration.
Yeah, it really would be.
I agree.
It would be.
Those are the people that would understand my pictures.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I want to thank you so much.
It's been an amazing conversation.
I want to thank you as well for what you've done because as you said, a lot of us see
it, but it's, we stand at parties and people don't know what we see in the desperation.
And you see people on television saying, oh, this community is this way, or the problem
with the homeless is this.
And you're like, no, no, we have a very, very different lens.
And I feel like your photography, which is one of the reasons why we connected in the
first place, really does line up with a lot of what a lot of us see.
And it's an important conversation.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on today.
Oh, thank you for having me.