Heroines: A Social Documentary

by Ken Dietrich-Campbell, Lincoln Clarkes (Photographer), Ken Dietrich-Campbell

Winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award The Heroines Series is an epic photographic documentary of the addicted women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In 1997, fashion and portrait photographer Lincoln Clarkes turned his lens away from the world of glamour and began documenting the dire circumstances being endured by the marginalized women living and working on the streets of Vancouver’s most troubled neighbourhood. The Heroines Series consists of over 400 portraits of addicted women in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, and has garnered national and international media attention. Peace Arch Entertainment produced a one-hour documentary film, A Photographic Obsession , earlier this year for BRAVO! and Women’s Television Network. The film &quote;is a study in pain and intimacy, artistic expression fuelled by passion and moral outrage&quote; and is accompanied by original poems written and narrated by Susan Musgrave. The documentary opened the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival and has been screened at several other festivals since its premiere in June of 2001.

Genres: Photography, Art

136 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2002

Reviews

[Care · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the idea behind this book. Putting a face to the systemic violence of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. 105 portraits of marginalized women, moving, arresting, heartbreaking images. What holds me back from loving this is that the women are (ONCE AGAIN) given no voice. They are reduced to their tattered clothing, their broken spirits, their haunting eyes. We digest their bodies, render them bodies not minds once again. They have no space in this book to speak their mind, tell a story, send a message to the audience. This, I think, holds the book back from being actually moving. Moving the reader/viewer to act.

[DW]

I picked this book up because of the controversy. I wanted to better understand it.

In the end, I think the book proves that good intentions and carefully worded theory cannot undo the male gaze. A defender even pens a rambling academic essay dragging every thinker available in the West to excuse it, but it is indeed there. In the shots. In how the project was carried out. In what was and was not said.

There are some noble intentions. Hell, the photography is compositionally really great. But at the end of the day, the book cites statistics of the DTES in the last chapter that only mention men. It only offers a single story at the beginning to contextualize a single photo into being a full human being and reduces the remainder of the women to models. I wonder if they got paid for their modeling, but I doubt it.

It might have started conversations and helped raise awareness, which is important, but this book is ignorant. And for those who scream 'but think of the art'? You need to step back and realize that art is also the context and consequences it produces.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are really good photographs, and I appreciated the essays inside as well. The Patricia Canning Essay, "Photographer as Witness" says some really interesting things about photojournalism, and how it's been impacted by a news cycle that's sped up, just the same as the written news has. It makes a difference, how the photographer spends time with a place or people - if you have to speed in and out, it has an impact on the work.

But like the essayists note, Clarkes had a strong relationship with the people and places in his photograph. They're very strong, and communicate a lot. And being able to read about the way the photographs continued to live in the women's lives was also quite striking.

[Michael Haller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most meaningful non-fiction book I’ve read has to be Lincoln Clarkes Heroines. When I was going to art school at ECIAD I rented a basement suite in a neighborhood just east of Chinatown that happened to be three doors down from Lincolns. I was photographing some sculpture in the yard one day when he passed by on the sidewalk and told me I was doing it wrong. We started a conversation about photography and he offered to show me pictures from a new series he was working on for a book called Heroines. I went over and he showed me this photograph of three women sitting in the doorway of the Evergreen Hotel at 333 Columbia St. It was unforgettable. You can see all the photographs and read the essays on his website.

http://worldwidegreeneyes.com/categor...

Heroines was the only book I stuffed in my bag when I left to do my MFA, and afterward when I left to teach English in Istanbul and Seoul. It still holds mysterious appeal for me because it examines Vancouver’s darker side, and “the road less travelled”.

http://www.amazon.com/Heroines-The-Ph...

[Emily Andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

people don't usually put much stock in the few things that are written in a book that consists mainly of photography. in this book, the writing gives a whole new dimension to the photographs; it is not simply something to be glossed over. the writing it something to be studied in the context of the photographs.