n story. This proves to be a greatly effective means of objectively educating the public on the plight of the people that the images present. Therefore, the viewer is not looking at just another junkie cooking up, but a person with a name and a history: i.e. Kerrie, a girl that has prostituted her body since the age of fifteen to support herself. In one of Riss images entitled 5 Cent Lodging, he has photographed straight on, a slew of men who have paid a nickel to slumber for the evening in a tiny, filthy room. The image exudes the desperate state of the men. Due to change in photography technology and many years of progression in imaging, Richards compositions differ greatly from that of Riss traditional style. The ideas communicated are, however, quite similar. One of Richards photographs shows Michael, a fifteen year old crack addict, who shares a room with is equally addicted mother. It is a picture of them sleeping on a small couch in their rented windowless eight-by-twelve-foot room in a hit house. Like Richards, Riss was also concerned with the morose tendency of the very poor to self medicate. In his Stale Beer Dive on Mulberry Bend, Riss shows patrons of the pub where they can acquire spoiled beer for as little as penny. Many of the men are passed out on the tables, ill from the bad beer. The scene shows none of the gayety often associated with the bar. One hundred years later, Richards shows that the drugs have changed but the pathetic condition have not. With the introduction of crack cocaine in the eighties, the idea of the destructively drunk seems mild. The images of the down trodden in taverns has since been replaced by people smoking rock in hit houses.Similar to Lewis Hine, a documentary photography whose aim was to bring public awareness to the exploitation of child labor, Richards desires to show the role that children play in the drug underworld. One of his pictures from Philadelphia has two kids sif...
