East Liverpool, Ohio, USA

I stayed in the town of East Liverpool, Ohio for three days in 2003. I spoke with people, drove around, and made photographs. I met Mary Jane Foster who began telling me almost everything about the town and what was going on there. It was the beginning of an intriguing, humorous, sad, and delightful conversation that lasted many years before she died of cancer. Many think the high number of cancer deaths in East Liverpool is due to the toxic waste in the area from the Shippingport nuclear plant just two miles from East Liverpool. In 2004 I was in East Liverpool when a young woman named Tiffany Faulk was murdered by her boyfriend who beat her to death with a baseball bat when he was “ cracked out, “ on a mix of drugs. I was not looking for violence, murder, or drugs, but, it was a simple fact. Drugs are there and this murder happened. This is the reality of the place. I felt the responsibility to get to work. I respectfully approached Tiffany Faulks family and they allowed me to photograph at her funeral. The photographs that I made that day were the beginning of this project. This project is about community, struggle, individuals. It’s about watching a friend die of cancer like many others in the community because of hazardous waste in the area. It’s about the horrible ease of getting drugs like heroin, and watching it destroy people and communities. It’s also about trying to see the best in people and hoping they will come through. It’s about connection, friendships, race, lack of opportunity. It’s about the difficulty in judging or moralizing people, and what those boundaries are. It’s about really listening to what people are saying and capturing the psychic landscape of East Liverpool, Ohio.