Photographer
Will Steacy spent two years documenting the bleak landscape of America's forgotten city outskirts.
Here he narrates a gallery of his work.
In my ongoing series
Down These Mean Streets, I examine fear and the abandonment of America's inner cities. Photographing only at night with a large format view camera, I work in a set routine by walking from the airport to the central business district of each city I photograph.
In back of this car you can make out a tent—there were also tents on either side of me and in all directions. We have become numb to the fact that there are people living on the streets, under bridges, and in railroad tunnels.
My focus is the parts of the city you don’t want to be in at night; the part of town you drive through with your windows rolled up and doors locked. The guts and history of the American city lie between the airport and city center, as a portrait of the modern day American inner city has gone missing. America has turned its back on cities through years of abandonment and neglect, allowing neighborhoods to crumble with no local economy, a public-education system that barely meets requirements, a low-income housing disaster, few options for proper nutrition and health care. Violence and drugs reign, and there seems to be little or no way out as survival becomes a No. 1 priority.
Will Steacy
Many areas of Detroit reminded me of a post-Katrina New Orleans. Except there was no storm here, only the near extinction of American jobs, no local economy and a housing crisis.
Will Steacy
Where have the people gone? In areas with row after row of foreclosed and abandoned homes, no businesses, no food stores, you are lucky if you find some fast-food place or a liquor store. Here, there are no resources, no playgrounds, no sense of community, just a collection of what we push and sweep under the carpet and would like to forget about.
Will Steacy
This guy jumped from the roof of the Taj Mahal casino parking garage and hit a light post before landing on the sidewalk. Half his clothes were ripped off and his arms and legs were twisted around and bent up in the wrong direction. At first I thought it was just some junkie passed out but when I took a second look, no body could contort into those positions. Mike and Valerie, who saw it happen, said the sound of his body hitting the cement sounded like a car wreck. It's weird sometimes to see the dead when death is fresh, the body still warm and traces of life lingering.
Will Steacy
The house I grew up in was a block away from a big crack corner in Philly. And when crack was big in the late '80s/early '90s, my house was repeatedly broken into; mostly just crackheads grabbing what they could so they could flip it and get high. This is where my fear of the night began. I remember as a child lying in bed half the night scared that someone was going to break in any minute, waiting for a window to open or a footstep. Eventually I got over this and had other things to worry about and keep me up at night. But for me there will always been something about the night, a world that does not exist during the day.
Will Steacy
I was walking along the Atlantic City boardwalk and I kept hearing some of my favorite blues songs. As I got closer I discovered a man singing over instrumentals coming from a homemade speaker attached to a push cart. I stood for a while and listened to this man, who called himself Sammy, sing his heart out. When I look at this picture I imagine Sammy singing those songs as if he had written them and lived them, and I kinda think that his life wasn't far off from those songs and maybe this homeless guy on the boardwalk wailing his heart out is really just telling us his story.
Will Steacy
This is one of my favorite images in the series and is a gateway into my next project examining the newspaper industry and how we access information.
Will Steacy
As I made this photograph I kept seeing people run in and out of the shadows, in and out of these abandoned project buildings. Were people living here? The sadness, desperation, rotting, violence, crime, drugs, survival, the limited resources, the seemingly non-existent options and choices, no future, the hopelessness... It is incredibly hard to experience and witness this and even harder to swallow that our country allows its own people to live this way. It is hard to make these photographs night after night. I have let many photographs go. I just couldn't do it. I left them there. The sadness and desperation at times were just too overwhelming and unbearable. Part of the process for me is letting it all in, soaking it up, and I only had so much in me. It is one thing to feel it and another to photograph it.
Will Steacy
This project was fueled by America's preoccupation with homeland security and protecting our country from foreign forces. As a nation at war abroad, it appears we have lost sight of what it is we are for fighting for. We have forgotten our own cities, neighborhoods and streets. By addressing the overwhelming loss and despair that prevail in our urban communities, my aim is to reveal an intimate look at what our cities have become as problems and issues cannot be solved if they are not first identified.
Will Steacy
This is an environmental nightmare to me. The people who live in this house are going to be sick living within such close proximity to a power plant. But for many, you live where you live because you have to, not because you want or choose to, but because there is no other choice.
Will Steacy
This photograph was made in the South Side of Chicago. A crackhead told me she was going to kill me as I was taking this picture as she walked away from me. Before I took this picture, I stood at an intersection a couple of blocks away and watched two people break into a car (on the street side of the car!) and across from that a group of wild, desperate and bored teenagers run in and out of a corner store that separated the employees and customers in bulletproof glass. As kids ran in and out of the store they gracefully and effortlessly leaped over the man who was passed out lying on the sidewalk in front of the store's doorway. As I proceeded several feet down the block, a man with a gun in his hand quickly walked past me toward the store.
Will Steacy recommends you direct your contributions to the organization
A Better Chance.
