Righteous Dopefiend

In Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction and Poverty in Urban America, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg document the daily lives of homeless drug users, drawing upon more than a decade of fieldwork they conducted among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers who survive on the streets of San Francisco’s former industrial neighborhoods. Numerous black and white photographs are interwoven with edited transcriptions of tape recorded conversations, fieldwork notes, and critical analysis to explore the intimate experience of homelessness and addiction. Revealing the social survival mechanisms and perspectives of this marginalized “community of addicted bodies,” the exhibition also sheds light on the often unintended consequences of public policies that can exacerbate the suffering faced by street-based drug users in America.

More Than Just an Exhibit

This exhibition extends beyond gallery walls and encourages conversation and introspection of oft-ignored topics:

• Mark Auslander and his team at Central Washington University used Righteous Dopefiend as a lens to examine how homelessness effects the local community in their project "Between Night and Day".
• The Fix – one of the web's premier resources on addiction and recovery – says of the exhibition, "The results force us to confront those people, the ones in the street that we walk past every day."