FILBERT STREET

I KNOW SOME PEOPLE THINK A WHITE WOMAN should not be attempting to document a group of older black crack addicts, but I'm doing it in this gallery because I believe people living with addiction should not be hidden. Even though I cannot walk in a homeless person's shoes, I am capable of empathy and understanding. As an outsider, I may not see all sides of a story but if I take enough time I will run head-first into a lot of them. A more difficult problem, I think, is the bias inherent in all documentary photography: we insist we are telling the truth while knowing most truths are socially constructed and change over time. We show our best photos knowing they might be misinterpreted.

I STARTED THIS PROJECT after the city closed down a tiny urban park where the addicts and dealers of West Oakland's "Ghostown" hung out for more than 30 years. In an astonishingly bad instance of urban planning, a new “Plaza” was built that has not been used for more than three years. The old cement tables and chairs were bulldozed and $465,00 was spent to build a Plaza that looks like a cage. (See it in this gallery). The neighborhood "community" the city gathered to plan the new Plaza abandoned it after it was built. And no wonder: the addicts and dealers didn’t just disappear — they moved to the surrounding sidewalks.

I APPROACHED THE ADDICTS  AND EX-GANGSTERS who re-grouped on the Filbert Street side of the park because they were older, like me. I photographed a few who seemed friendly and came back to give them portraits, and I kept coming back because I fell in love with their faces and it was fun to be welcomed as "The Picture Lady."  It wasn't a great scene  — I heard a lot of arguments and craziness — but it wasn't all misery. People can be happy when they are high. I even had a dream one night that I said "yes" to an offer of crack.

After a year or so of taking portraits, my journalistic background kicked in so I got out my recorder, announced I would pay $20 for a story, and started hearing things I could not make beautiful. Not with the right light, not with the perfect moment, not with a smile or a nod. Addiction is ugly. Abuse in all of its forms is ugly. Guilt is ugly. Deep poverty is ugly. Addicts can be ugly parents. But we are all innocent when we are born and many of the addicts insisted they were happy growing up simply because someone — a mother or grandmother — took care of them. Their mother could be an alcoholic and get crazy at night; their father could be in and out of prison; they could have seen family members shooting up. But if they were clothed, fed, and taken to school like the other kids, that was enough. They had friends like them and a mother or grandmother who loved them. Things changed when they were teenagers. Most ran away from their homes, often for reasons they can't fully explain. The boys needed money and thought they could get some by being “cool” and selling drugs. The girls fell for the cool baby daddys who ended up leaving them. Many of the women I photographed said they were pregnant when they were in middle school. All had been raped, some sadistically.

NOT ALL OF THE FAMILIES WERE DYSFUNCTIONAL. If you were a poor, black, working mother in West Oakland and your kid didn't do well in school it was hard to keep him or her off the street. Maybe you had three kids who turned out OK and just one who couldn't make it. Maybe you got your son into the military; maybe you helped your 13-year-old daughter raise her baby; maybe you prayed as hard as you could. And still, in the end, you had to kick your own child out of your house.

I have no solution to the city's problem with the dealers and addicts who are still in West Oakland and I sympathize with the neighbors who want them to leave. I felt completely safe on Filbert Street for over a year, even with my expensive camera hanging on my neck, but in March of 2018, I was mugged by a young man I never saw. He yanked my camera strap off me so hard I fell down and broke my two front teeth. (I heard he went to jail a few weeks later because during a fight with his baby mama he dropped their infant baby.) I bought a new camera and started photographing again until - two months later - I was mugged a second time in a nearby homeless camp.

My takeaway from all this is that despite the seemingly huge gap between me and the Filbert Street addicts, we are all pretty much the same. Our emotions are exactly the same. We all have loved and want to be loved. We all want to have some kind of independence and dignity. We all have tried to understand the world around us and want to be understood. When I ask the folks on Filbert Street what is the most important thing in their lives, they say the same thing: their children and grandchildren. And they are almost never completely alone. There is always some family member who loves them and prays for them and will take them in – if they somehow manage to get clean.