![]() They actually track past month, past year, and lifetime use and also track “substance abuse disorders”, to distinguish casual users from users with a more serious problem. Well, the government actually does a survey every year to figure out how many people are using various drugs, and “pain relievers” is a category. ![]() I believe the contrast between subject matter and visual approach mirrors the tension I see as inherent to life in Lost Hills.The guest is telling the standard “pain medicine caused an epidemic of opioid addiction” narrative. To highlight it, I transpose the motifs of my magazine portrait work – cross-sourced lighting, saturated color palette, admiring gaze – to this one-stoplight town. I’m interested in documenting this knife’s edge of inclusion that these people negotiate each day. But because some of Lost Hills’ residents are undocumented immigrants, all are assumed to be, and so may be cut out of their own American dream, and denied their place in the American historical record. ![]() These individuals embody the bootstrapping grit and cooperative frontier spirit of the American West – and are living a new iteration of the “Okie” experience so prominent in our national psyche. Today a new group of migrants, this time Chicanos and Mexicans, again wrings a wage from the Valley’s parched soil. Lost Hills is a town of 3,500 farm and oilfield workers located at the southern end of California's Central Valley the same agricultural region where the “Okies” headed in search of work as they fled the dust bowls of the 1930s.
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