[Leica] WEEK 9 (OR WHATEVER).

[Lee Bacchus <lbacchus@home.com>]

This week's shot and its alternate are from a small project I'm working on
for a local community service group that toils in one of the Western world's
most notorious neighborhoods, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It's a small
area with big problems: drug use that leads to more than 200 overdose deaths
a year, epidemic HIV infection and the ravages of poverty. For me, it
presented a difficult photographic problem ‹ and not just the danger from
the more paranoid crack addicts who like cameras about as much as they like
detox (I've been confronted three times, threatened twice but never
assaulted). For me the problem is in how to portray a neighborhood like this
without dredging up the standard tough-love, in-your-face imagery of needle
injections or the hard-core grotesques that play to middle-class fears but
little else ‹ or worse, dispensing candy-coated images with cornball
cliches. Most of what I've shot so far are simple and straight shots of
people on the street (whom I've asked) but a few are of the unavoidable
evidence of the place's hellish, sometimes hidden nightmare. I'm trying for
a quiet reminder here in these images, not a loud exclamation. But perhaps
they are too melodramatic even at that. I'd appreciate any responses. Scroll
to the bottom of 
http://www.photo.net/photodb/presentation.tcl?presentation_id=52810 to view.
Thanks for any help,
Lee Bacchus
Vancouver