Circumstance

Thanks to Shaun - Pullitzer Prize photos that'll put your feet back on the ground.
Careful, airy-fairy types, these are bound to bring you down.

I checked out 1998's prize winner Clarence Williams. Clarence photographed children of drug addicts. Look at young Tamika. It really breaks my heart to imagine what her future's like, and even though there's no predicting tomorrow, somehow, it feels certain that her life will run like how Hollywood would depict the story of a junkie's pretty daughter, and it'd be hard to argue with that.

I have a visual already.

Tamika as a teenager (sometime now in fact).
Tamika at 21.
Tamika as a young mother.

Will the world break her?
Will she make it?

Will we?

I cannot imagine what it'd be like to be born in the face of heroin and HIV. Mad social integration issues. What would you tell Tamika? Her face in your hands... "little babe, I'm sorry but you got born into some seriously screwed circumstances, and hey, it might be better if we take you away from mom now... or maybe when you turn 12 and the sparkles dry from your eye."

Think she'd be a little disappointed.




Caption: With a child's spontaneous joy, Tamika smiles as she runs past her mother and Johnny, a man they lived with briefly. "My dad's in prison," Tamika explained recently. "And my mom is sad."