Righteous Dopefiends To Descend On Penn Museum Later This Week
Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg spent more than a decade among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers who survive on the streets of San Francisco’s former industrial neighborhoods. Their extensive research formed the subject of a provocative new book, Righteous Dopefiend (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2009), and now, a new exhibition. Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction, and Poverty in Urban America, opens Saturday, December 5, 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia and runs through May 2010. More than forty black-and-white photographs are interwoven with edited transcriptions of tape-recorded conversations, field notes, and critical analysis to explore the intimate experience of homelessness and addiction.
[Photo credit: From the exhibition Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction and Poverty in Urban America, December 5, 2009 through May 2010 at the Penn Museum. © Jeff Schonberg 2009.]
