Harrowing face of addiction - PHOTO

A Canadian photographer has brought heroin addicts out of the shadows to show the ravaging affect addiction has on the women's lives. For five years Lincoln Clarkes photographed more than 400 women in Vancouver's downtown Eastside to expose a side of life many prefer to turn away from. The resulting images reveal a world of broken dreams and dangers, but also helped reclaim the identities of the women, five of whom became victims of a serial killer. By making the women the focus of the series, featured on his website worldwidegreeneyes.com, Clarkes helped make the addicts more than just another depressing statistic.The award-winning photographer began his project after meeting 20-year-old addict Patricia Johnson, who invited him into her home - and world. From 1997 he spent five years in the neighborhood meeting addicts and offering them $5, cigarettes, juice and a release form in return for posing for him.Sometimes he would offer them a one-way bus ticket to try to get them away from the drug-riddled areas they were living in. At the time, it was estimated that 10,000 addicts were living in a 10-block area of the city. From seemingly fresh faced women whose aged eyes betray their desperation, to the pregnant or those shooting up on the sidewalk, Clarke's photos are hard to turn away from. His resulting pictures were described by the Los Angeles Times as: 'Photographs that speak about obsession - a young woman’s fatal fixation with drugs, a photographer’s addiction to capturing her crumbling beauty'.Clarkes chose to shoot his subjects in black and white, and often had only a few minutes in which to set up the shot and move on.'I didn't want to take the typical addict photograph - hair in their eyes, doing drugs in some disheveled hotel room,' he said, adding that he wanted to show they were still radiant. As more and more images were added to the project, Clarkes became more involved with the addicts' lives, and would add a green sticker to their image when they died - from overdoses, violent crime or sickness.Women he had met and photographed had started to disappear too. Eventually a pig farmer on the outskirts of the city was arrested for multiple murders - five of his victims had posed for Clarkes.It is believed more than 30 women were murdered by Robert Pickton, according to the Vancouver Sun. The serial killer had befriended prostitutes and addicts, before luring them to his farm.Clarkes had photographed at least five of Pickton's victims, and the women's relatives started coming to the photographer's studio to view the portraits. The five-year project was emotionally exhausting for Clarkes, who said: 'I knew I couldn't help them ... I couldn't be their shrink or their priest or their doctor. I couldn't save them.'He told Vice Magazine: 'Each woman had private tales that I tried to tell silently in the language of a photograph.''It was an introduction to the people uptown that didn’t want to see or know these women. For the first time they were looking into their eyes.'(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az