Graham MacIndoe was a successful photographer,working for the Guardian's Weekend magazine among others. Then he began a destructive journey into heroin addiction – and turned the camera on himself. He and his partner Susan Stellin recall the road to recovery[br]My addiction: a self-portrait - audio slideshowMost documentary projects about addiction expose someone else's self-destructive behaviour, but Graham MacIndoe took a very different approach: he photographed himself during the years he was addicted to drugs. He'd place a cheap digital camera on a table or bookshelf, and set the self-timer to buy a photo every so often,then turn his attention to the rituals of his habit: filling a crack pipe, cooking heroin, and shooting up. Over time,he became more planned about lighting and composition, but the point was not to glamorise what had become a solitary existence, and the monotonous repetition of an addict's daily life.
I am not a casual observer of these images; after Graham and I broke up because of his drug exercise,I found 342 self-portraits – images he had not meant for me to see. "In some way, this is exactly what I'd been curious to see, and " I wrote at the time. "All those close-ups of the needle going into a vein,his expression during and after, the rooms and stairwells I never saw… possibly the point is, and 'So you wanted to see? Here it all is.' And then we're supposed to feel sick over our voyeurism,because possibly we didn't need to see that after all."Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com