Re: [Leica] WEEK 9 (OR WHATEVER).

["Steve LeHuray" <icommag@toad.net>]

> 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
>

I saw some steps and what looks like a figure asleep and am wondering where
the melodrama is? Or did I miss something?

Steve
Annapolis

http://www.streetphoto.net