Bringing HIV, Substance Abuse and Homelessness into the University of Pennsylvania Anthropology Museum through Photo-Ethnography

Abstract

In the fall of 1994 I befriended a community of some two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers surviving under the overpasses of a tangle of freeways six blocks from where I lived in San Francisco. The full force of the Reagan-era cutbacks from the 1980s had trickled down to the street, shredding the already rachitic U.S. welfare safety-net. Inner-cities were gentrifying (especially those linked to the epicenters of global finance capital such as San Francisco). The former skid row habitat for the unstable urban poor—cheap single-residency hotels—was being converted into multi-million dollar condominiums. Urban police forces had not yet systematized, routinized and replicated their zero-tolerance enforcement, harassment/incarceration dragnets (Wacquant 2009) and homelessness, consequently, was at its most visible. Bourgeois residents like me could not walk down a block or drive up a freeway entrance ramp in downtown San Francisco without being solicited for spare change. I obtained a National Institutes of Health HIV prevention grant and for the next 12 years, together with a photographer/anthropologist collaborator Jeff Schonberg and several additional ethnographic team members, we followed the social network of homeless addicts surviving in my neighborhood, documenting the unhealthy effects of indigence and substance abuse.