Suzanne Stein | US: Slow Code

“I came to photography late and out of necessity. I was a single mother raising a son on the autism spectrum while struggling financially in a wealthy part of Southern California. I spent years advocating for him inside a school system that treated him with misunderstanding and indifference. That experience changed the way I saw the world. It sharpened my awareness of who gets ignored, who gets blamed, and who gets left behind.

When I picked up a camera in 2015, I had no technical background. I wasn’t thinking about photography as a career or an art movement. I was responding to what I felt. I found myself drawn to people living on the margins — people most others walk past without seeing. The camera became a way to translate anger, empathy, and urgency into something visible. It allowed me to record scenes that felt morally impossible to ignore.

This body of work centers on people passed out, collapsed, or otherwise suspended or incapacitated in moments that narrate deep, longstanding issues in America. These images are difficult to look at. They confront viewers with the reality of addiction, poverty, and mental illness in America. There is a growing pressure in my country to sanitize these realities, to replace them with softer language or to hide them entirely. But invisibility does not protect marginalized people. It abandons them. The more we look away, the worse their conditions become.

I photograph in neighborhoods like Kensington in Philadelphia, places many Americans only know through headlines or brief clips stripped of context. What interests me is not spectacle, but presence: everyday life unfolding in environments most people never enter. I am motivated by the belief that attention is a form of responsibility. To look carefully is to acknowledge that these lives matter, even when they are uncomfortable to witness.

My work is driven by the same instinct that pushed me to fight for my son — a refusal to accept indifference as normal. Photography, for me, is an act of insistence. It says: this is happening, these people exist, and we do not get to pretend otherwise.”

Suzanne Stein