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The Julie Project may be the most incredibly powerful photography project I've ever seen. It's also the most desperately sad.
Darcy Padilla is a documentary photographer who, in 1993, met a young woman named Julie and proceeded to document her life for eighteen years, until her death at the age of thirty-six. Julie's mother was an alcoholic and, from the age of six, she was sexually abused by her stepfather. She ran away from home at fourteen and became addicted to drugs, contracted HIV and spent her pitifully short life living in dank, miserable apartments, hostels and homeless shelters. Padilla became attached to Julie over the years, but her feelings don't cloud the honesty of these photographs, which are compelling, often beautiful and at times almost brutal. Reading about Julie's life is so desperately sad not just because of the terrible conditions and choices this one woman faced, but because this isn't an aberration. Despite the fact that it is one of the most affluent nations on Earth, this degree of abject, grinding poverty and neglect exists all over the United States. Indeed, it exists all over the developed world, in countries where we like to pride ourselves on how civilised we are. The Julie Project stands as a devastating testimony to the lives of those people who are born into terrible circumstances and who, neglected by the state, remain on the margins of society until what little they have is taken from them as well.
