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Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, is pleased to announce Righteous Dopefiend, on display in the Slought Foundation galleries from December 4-December 31, 2009. The exhibition takes the form of a photo-ethnographic collaboration between photographer Jeff Schonberg and anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, highlighting twelve years in the life of a community of homeless heroin addicts and crack smokers. A conversation between Philippe Bourgois and Jean-Michel Rabaté will take place on Friday, December 4, 2009 from 6:30-7:30pm, followed by the opening reception for the exhibition (Please note that this date has recently been updated).
In the photo-ethnography Righteous Dopefiend, Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg document the daily lives of homeless drug users in the U.S. inner city. Their research spans more than a decade of participant-observation fieldwork among homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers in a run-down warehouse district of San Francisco on the edge of the city’s defunct shipyards. The authors interweave edited transcriptions of tape recorded conversations, fieldwork notes, and critical theoretical analysis with black and white photographs to explore, over a twelve year period, the intimate experience of homelessness and addiction. The exhibit seeks to reveal the internal social logics and perspectives of homelessness and addiction. It also exposes on a practical level the unintended consequences of public policies, cultural, political and economic structures that exacerbate the levels of suffering faced by the indigent in America.
In conjunction with the publication of their book Righteous Dopefiend with University of California Press, this exhibition aims to promote a public dialogue around drugs, poverty and ethnicity. The exhibit’s photographs and accompanying text (fieldnotes, dialogues and analysis) bring an anthropological voice to vital contemporary issues in politics and the arts.
Homelessness and drug use have been the focus of several notable photography exhibits over the past century. The visual presentation of violence and poverty has provoked intense debate about the aestheticization of suffering. Critics have argued that exhibits often fail to provide adequate context for images by not distinguishing between perpetrators and victims and by obscuring the broader social structural forces that constrain the lives of the poor. This exhibit brings anthropology’s longstanding engagement with representations of difference
and human suffering to bear on these challenges of representation, objectification and analytical framing. The exhibit expands beyond the
aesthetic and the documentary to seek a social understanding of the experience and practice of physical and emotional addiction. The photographs are particularly compelling because they are long-term, intimate, and biographical, rather than generic and didactic. They are intended to move and involve the viewer, but also to reveal new understandings of contemporary social life and larger structurally-
imposed forces.
This program is made possible in part through the generous support of the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.
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