MAILINERS triptics

Once again, looking through folders and under folders in my archive, I fished out a series of triptics I put together a few years back, when trying to rappresent the lives and daily routines of these down and out crack and heroin abusers in London Elephant and Castle area. They are people I followed for about a year, trying to live in their shadow. Day after day after day, they became so acustomed by my presence that they opened their lives to me ... or better, they ended up not noticing me any longer in their rooms, and most gruesome addiction driven intimacy.

The more I went on with this project, the more I realized that their actions, fixing and smoking, were only too easy to take and more difficult was actually to construct their "other" intimacy, their relations and their characters as human beings, which although influenced 100 per cent their addiction or "drugs career", was becoming more and more the part of them I wanted to show... So how could I do that without falling into the usual heroin users' imagery all too redundant and repetitive in so much work I had seen done by others, famous and not?

In that period of time I was strongly fascinated by a woman photographer, Jodie Bibier, who I had the rare luck of knowing in the period when she was living in London. She gave some tutorials which I followed and in one particular lesson she showed an interesting multimedia piece used for a campaign against violence on women in South Africa. She was using a square format, which I was exploring for my self as an alternative language for my photography, but put together different women's testimonials by running them in triptics with the voices of their narrative accounts.

This was a great teaching for me and it was extremely valuable as I was trying to put together the Mainliners story more than a year later. I joined images in triptics to tell these people's characters and environments, themselves and the stories they talked to me about. Details of their lives as well as places from which they depended and which constituted their hide outs.

Steve, Tracey, Del Darren and Madalinehave probably never seen each other, although they all live in the same neighbourhood. The world they live is very similar, because they are all heroin and crack users and their lives are driven by this habit. This “monkey” which they all carry on their backs has destroyed their relations with the society which sorrounds them, as well as their personal lives. Their daily routine evolves entirely around drugs and they cannot keep away from the damage which these do to them emotionally, physically and fi nancially. Staying with them day after day , I realized how they truly live a parallel life to their environments, in which they walk and act completely unnoticed and anonymously, almost as if they were invisible.

Steve and Tracy, also known as Ginger and Hammy, are always together, because the thing they care the most about is that if one of them gets arrested while scoring drugs, their dog Sooky would not be left alone. Steve has just turned 29 and injects in his groin both heroin and crack together, a practice called speedballing. This at least 6 times a day, on top of his prescribed methadone. His last 12 years have been out of home, without shelter untill 3 years back when he was assigned a place in a shelter hostel in Southwark. Recently when I asked him about the area in which he lives, he said to me, “If I have to be honest, it is difficult to get out of drugs when they are in your face.”

Del Boy and Darren have a very special relationship. Social services have tried to break this many times but without success. They have been dividing everything for the past 8 years, the carboard they lay on when they were sleeping rough and now a social housing fl at assigned to Del about 18 months ago . It is in such a state that they have ended up sharing the same bed in one of the rooms where they do everything. As meticulously as they divide their begging shifts and incomes they register all monetary outcomes which go on drugs. For the 3 times the dealer comes to their house, they note in their “drugs usage” log, as they have titled it, how much “brown “ and “white” they buy, on each round. This is adding up to an average of 2000 pounds a month, more than most people would earn on salaries.

Madaline has been clean from heroin for more than a year, but the signs of the heroin use are evident on her body and deep in her mind. She has had a heart attack, a trachetomy and when she decided to withdraw and go into detox she came close to having her leg amputated, because of an abscess, where she kept injecting, which was at a dangerous stage of infection. She is very proud of being clean now, but is tackling daily with depression and a sense of being lost, as well as all the grief and anger given to her by the rest of her family because of years of heroin abuse.