Patricia Rose Johnson was the origional heroine. She came stumbling out of a doper's alley behind a Vancouver pawnshop, looking in her brazen, self destructive beauty like a young Courtney Love. Johnson was "tweeking", a street term for a symptom of cocaine psychosis, picking at the pavement for unused bits of rock cocaine. Lincoln Clarkes is a portrait photographer who sees grace in the most unlikely places, in the living and in the dying. Wandering the city's derelict Downtown eastside, documenting it's deteriorating but still gorgeous turn of the century architecture, he had often run across the prostitutes, addicts and drifters who populate the old skid row neighborhood. He'd say hello, hand out change.
But on a July afternoon in 1997, Patricia Johnson stopped him in his tracks. Barely 20, she clung to a childlike innocence coarsened by drugs and bad choices. Clarkes gave her a cigarette and they talked about heroin and addiction. Then he asked to take her picture. She was flattered. She took him to a room in the Evergreen Hotel, a vile flophouse were addicts shoot up in the hallways, and he waited while she and two friends primped like cheeleaders, fixing their hair, putting on lipstick, straightening their skirts and shorts. He posed them on the steps outside. A hoodlum cleaning his fingernails with a syringe cursed at them and told them to leave. They ignored him. Clarkes looked down into the Rolleiflex studio camera he held again his chest and took the picture.
That evening as he developed prints in a tiny bathroom that doubles as a home office darkroom, Clarkes was astonished by what he had captured, the women's haunted look, their bruised but trusting gaze. They seemed to peer right through his camera. Of the four shots, there was one he couldn't get out of his mind. "It changed my life," he says. "Here were three heroin sick women looking right into my eyes. I wept when I was that Photo". That picture was the beginning. It pulled Clarkes into a bewildering five year project that documented the drug addicted women of the Downtown Eastside. In all, he produced more than 400 black and white portraits of women so enthralleed by heroin and rock cocaine that they endured daily doses of violence and life on street where the AIDS transmission rate is among the highest in the industrialized world. The portraits became the subject of a 2001 television documentary and last year were published as a book. (Many of the black and white photo's here in the website are those taken by Clarkes.)
Clarkes called the series "Heroines". The word spoke not only to the women's addicions but to their role as the principal characters in his unfolding narrative. The project brought Clarkes more notoriety than money, and at times played with his sanity. "I just took the most beautiful picture of a dying woman," he would tell friends. His images unsettled many people in a country that prides itself on it's polite order and a tightly woven social safety net. Here, in the middle of one of Canada's most beautiful cities, stood the nation's poorest neighborhood and North America's largest open air drug market, according to health officials. But instead of thanking Clarkes for exposing the conditions, his critics refused to look. They accused the photographer of voyeurism and exploitation. The cesspool remained.
Over time, Johnson becme a regular presence in Clarke's life. Blonde and petite with a don't mess with me edge, she would abandon her revolving door hustle for heroin and sex to talk to him about her world. She had broken her boyfriend's heart, abandoning him and their two young children. She had embraced the drug instead of the family. She also unwittingly bound Clarkes to the most horrific skein of murders in Canadian history. As Clarkes was documenting life in the Downtown Eastside, women he photographed began vanishing. There's not much farther a person can fall than the downtown eastside, a neighborhood where addicts inject heroin and puff on crack popes in full view of police. "My first instinct was to blow the place up," says Stevie Cameron, a Canadian crime writer researching a book there. "I once saw a young woman shooting heroin up her nostril."
Most share a tragic past, they were sexually abused as children, years later, they self medicate with heroin and rock cocaine. Josie, for instance, is an aboriginal woman who grew up on a farm, where her foster father raped her for more than a decade. When she refused his demands, she explained in the documentary, he would kill a favorite farm animal and threaten that she would be next. Sometimes he gave her money, which she hid in balls of yarn. eventually she amassed more than a thousand dollars, which she refused to take with her when she finally moved on to another foster home. It was dirty money, she said. So how did the neighborhood become a receptacle for the nation's ills? John Lowman, a criminologist at Vancouver's Simon Frasier University, says the city simply looked the other way.