Bruce Gilden Only God Can Judge Me 2018 magasin signé première édition femmes toxicomanes

BRUCE GILDEN. Only God Can Judge Me, London: Browns Editions, 2018.

Tall folio (250x376mm), first edition of 700, unpaginated (56 pages), glossy printed boards, full-bleed color photos, 1 gatefold, signed on a preliminary leaf by Gilden.

Pictures of prematurely aging female drug addicts taken outdoors in Overtown, Miami, showing faces of a harsh existence close up. These people can be hard to look at, portrayed intimately by a photographer who knows the territory all too well, being a former addict and the son of an addict. He says he sees his mother in the faces of his subjects. "This personal motivation is the genesis of my ongoing project, Only God Can Judge Me, on prostitutes and drugs. ... It's hard to imagine how much suffering and how little hope their stories contain. ...

"I want to continue this project and attract attention to them and to what drugs did to them. It's always interesting when people say that they have trouble looking at these faces. This can happen to anyone's loved one. Just imagine you have to look at your mother's face."