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Chapter 61
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The crime of the poor - like the exploitation by the rich - is
almost impossible to photograph. You can take pictures of the
result, but rarely of the process itself. One junkie in the act of
burglarizing almost stabbed me in the stomach with his "blade" and
it took me a whole night afterwards to make him trust me. |
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Usually I would be with criminals for days before
photographing them. In order to survive among them it was a deadly
necessity that I always had faith in their inner goodness,
directing myself toward the human being inside and away from the
role the system normally forced them to model their lives on.
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By photographing their shady activities I was
relating more to their environmental side and thus betraying the
trust they had given me. I always wanted to photograph crime as
seen from the point of view of the criminal, but to photograph I
had to set myself at a distance and so was no longer "one of
them." Recording the system's violence was easier than
photographing its counter-violence. |
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Here I was caught in a shoot-out between police
and criminals in Harlem. A policeman rushed over and used my
doorway as a firing position whereby I suddenly found myself
photographically on the side of the police. |
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On such occasions I began to understand the brutal
but all-too-human re-actions of the police. Their racist attitudes
and lack of understanding of the reactions bred by our outside
oppression is one of the reasons for the angry charges of police
brutality. Society has trained the police to expect the worst
instead of communicating with the good in people. Therefore they
shoot before they question. |
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In general I find it to be an act of violence to
carry weapons into a ghetto, since this shows that you have no
faith in the people of the ghetto, which breeds counter-violence.
The police build on the negative in people and thereby promote it.
If they instead like British police arrived unarmed with open
faces they would have a chance to foster the positive sides I
always managed to find in even the worst types "who will kill for
a dollar" or a camera. The police build up a climate of fear on
both sides which makes brutality inevitable. |
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Much of it is sanctioned by white authorities.
Many states passed laws authorizing the police to break into
people's homes without knocking. Many innocent people have been
killed in this way which I give sad example of in the following
story. |
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