Cynthia, forty six, starting working as a prostitute at the age of thirteen. She turned to the streets after battling her single mother in Brooklyn. “I didn’t want to listen to her. She didn’t give me any time.” Cynthia is now the mother of fifteen children, eleven of whom are still alive. Her “baby” is sixteen, her oldest child thirty.
We talked about the child prostitutes in Hunts Point now. She told me “Hunts Point isn’t what it used to be, when the girls would stick together. Then came crack and heroin, that fucked up everything. A girl out there at that age. She got no choice. It ain’t right.”
Cynthia was strung out, agitated and slurring. When I asked her how she wanted to be described she looked me in the eye, thought for a second, then said “An honest person. Thats what I am. An honest person.”
I love you.
Thanks for sharing these very strong photographs and their stories.
Amazing depth of work that evokes both a visual and mental feeling. Well done. J
The pain and the poetry. Thanks for connecting me to this work. Addiction is a real sad story and I think Chris is documenting it in a very honest way.
p.s I don’t give a shiznit about what you said when how you said what, and I don’t really care that this guy is a or was a banker.
the work speaks for itself.