Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cocaine True Cocaine Blue
Cocaine True Cocaine Blue
Full Text:
Eugene Richards. Aperture, $40 (164p) ISBN 0-89381-543-8
Richards's searing photo-essay on inner-city communities devastated by the cocaine-crack epidemic brings into sharp focus the
colossal failure of the "war on drugs." His unsparing black-and-white photographs--spliced with interviews with dealers, drug users
and frustrated police officers--cover only three locales: North Philadelphia and the Brooklyn, New York, neighborhoods of East New
York and Red Hook. Yet the havoc drugs wreak on lives, families and neighborhoods--as cocaine and heroine addiction intersect with
poverty, AIDS, homelessness, joblessness and the availability of guns--affects every American city. Richards, who has won many
photo-journalism awards, neither condemns nor sensationalizes his subjects in his forceful documentary. This volume complements a
traveling exhibit opening at Manhattan's International Center for Photography. (Jan.)