Faces Of Addiction: Chris Arnade Discusses The New York You Don't Normally See

I first spoke to Chris Arnade in 2013, when his "Faces of Addiction" photography series was going viral. His work continues to explore the unseen New York and, now, the East Coast. Arnade has a Ph.D. in physics, worked on Wall Street but gave that up. Currently, he's contributing to the Guardian and documenting Hunt's Point and traveling to similar neighborhoods.

Arnade broke his leg earlier in 2014 which hindered his ability to work on his project. Prior to that, Arnade was traveling to different places but did not focus on developing a "Faces of Addiction" project in different cities.

"To do the project properly you need at least a year or so. The goal was to see if the basic views that I learned from the Bronx hold true in Providence or in Philadelphia, and they do. My thesis has always been that poverty and addiction is a trauma and it’s equivalent to childhood trauma. Much of your life beyond that is kind of what most people would call post-traumatic stress syndrome," Arnade said.

He called poverty and addiction "death by a thousand cuts. "Be it the criminal justice system, be it the political system, it’s a fairly stacked deck," Arnade said.

Most recently, Arnade moved to Bronxville and reflected on his time in Brooklyn in a post titled, "Some Things I Will Miss About Brooklyn," be it the local bars, the children playing in fire hydrants or the pigeon keepers who let their flocks out in the late afternoon. "The intention was that what a lot of what I like about Brooklyn is gone. I generally feel that way about most of New York, except for the Bronx." Gentrification and the changing landscape have altered but some of the old New York City has remained intact, just, "Not the parts people see."