Josh Meltzer's impressive photographs from his and Beth Macy's new book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America went on display this past weekend at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke in anticipation of the book's release Tuesday, August 7.
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Josh Meltzer
Kristi Fernandez
After the death of her 19-year-old son, Kristi Fernandez became obsessed with the story of her son’s swift descent into addiction, the missing details that might explain how he went from being a high-school hunk and burly construction worker to a heroin-overdose statistic. In 2016, she asked the author to interview the convicted heroin dealer police claimed was responsible for creating a “tsunami of misery” in her quaint Shenandoah Valley town.
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Josh Meltzer
Dr. Art Van Zee
From the small, sliding-scale clinic where he practices in Virginia’s westernmost county, Dr. Art Van Zee was among the first physicians in the country to warn people about the dangers of OxyContin. The overdose victims showing up in the E.R. in the late 1990s weren’t simply his patients; they were also dear friends, many of them descendants of the coalminers whose pictures lined his exam-room walls.
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Josh Meltzer
Vinnie Dabney
Substance-abuse counselor Vinnie Dabney had been a mostly functioning heroin user for three decades before court-ordered treatment in the late 1990s put him on the path to sobriety. “The moment [heroin] crossed those boundary lines from the inner city into the suburbs, it became an ‘epidemic.’ But nobody paid attention to it until their cars were getting robbed, and their kids were stealing their credit cards.”
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Courtesy of Josh Meltzer
Josh Meltzer working on images.
The Taubman has scheduled a book launch and community conversation with Macy and Meltzer—along with guests Vinnie Dabney, Sister Beth Davies and Patricia Mehrmann—covering the mobilization against the opioid epidemic, the central focus of Macy's third book. It is scheduled Sunday, Aug. 12, at 2 p.m. A book signing will immediately follow and Meltzer will lead a tour of the museum's presentation of his portraits. The Taubman exhibition of Meltzer's works for the book is titled “Beth Macy and Josh Meltzer: Portraits from the Frontline of the Opioid Epidemic.” The show runs through Dec. 30.
Meltzer, who worked at The Roanoke Times with Macy for several years, teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He was an award-winning staff photographer at The Times, using modern equipment, but for the Dopesick photos, he reverted to an old Speed Graphic, the basic camera for journalists through the first half of the 20th Century.
Courtesy of Josh Meltzer
Beth Macy and Josh Meltzer
Beth Macy and Josh Meltzer
The Speed Graphic was invented in Rochester in 1912 and continued to be used—though much less frequently—until 1972. It is the bulky camera you see newspaper photographers lugging around in old movies (the ones where reporters word PRESS cards in ther hats).
Metzler related his experience with the Speed Graphics thusly, “I used two from the 1950s. I bought each on eBay, maybe 15 years ago. One of my first assignments at The Roanoke Times, after I moved to Roanoke in 1999, was to photograph O. Winston Link, who was being photographed on a Steam locomotive for a Vanity Fair edition of the greatest living 80-year-old photographers or something like that.
“A portrait photographer from New York City was here to photograph him and I was documenting the circus around all of that. Link was gracious when I introduced myself to him while a stylist was trimming his eyebrows for the portrait and he said he enjoyed my work, which I was perplexed by, since he lived out of state. I learned that he still subscribed to The Roanoke Times to keep up on the news of the region where he became famous.
“I didn't know anything about his work, and had never heard of him then, but began to research his photographic process, and was interested in playing around with large format cameras, and Speed Graphics can be quite affordable (and still are).
“It performs quite well. I sent it off to a shop in Charlottesville last year to have a modification installed to allow a focusing hood to be placed on the back so that I can focus easily without using a dark cloth to shield the light, so it has become slightly easier to use. Basically, I've had these cameras since then and never really used them for anything serious, and when Beth Macy and I began talking almost two years ago about making portraits and landscapes for her book, it seemed like the perfect tool.
Josh Meltzer
Meltzer's gear
“You work very slowly with this medium, and for me at least, that slowness allowed for lots of time to chat with the subjects, since there is considerable setup and take down time in using the camera. I even felt in a way that using this old camera, with large format film, gave a sense of respect to the subjects of the portraits, in terms of honoring their work on the front lines of this horrific plight by using a very formal and slow process camera, instead of having the ability to rapid fire images from a modern digital camera.
“I actually had a lot of film. I would buy it when I saw some on sale or when I saw a photographer switching to digital who had a whole freezer full of film, I would buy the whole lot and stored it in my freezer, just waiting for such a project. [At Rochester Institute of Technology], we still have an amazing darkroom setup, so I was able to process all of the film there, scan it all in with really high-resolution scanners and work with our in-house print shop to print the images for the Taubman exhibition.
“I'll definitely use it again. I have some lenses in mind I'd like to purchase to round out some missing focal lengths and now that I've got my workflow pretty dialed in, I feel like I'm ready to use it again soon.
“The detail from the images is simply amazing and the process is super fun. There are a dozen ways one can screw up each negative while making the image (and I think I made all of those mistakes on this project), so it is a careful process, but it's also really worthwhile still, for me to see those images on the film after washing the negatives.
Josh Meltzer
Meltzer's gear
“I shot about 300 negatives for this project, and I can only process 12 at a time in my development tank, so the development process took more than a week of darkroom work. I'm incredibly thankful for the staff at RIT who provided me with chemistry and technical help whenever I needed it.”
"A few of the images I shot with a Holga, which is a plastic medium format camera, even the lens is plastic, so the images come out pretty dreamy, foggy on the edges and have a beautiful look to them. I believe the one of Kristi Fernandez sitting at her son's grave was made with that camera."
Dopesick
The cover for "Dopesick" by Beth Macy
Macy's newest book has been so eagerly anticipated that her husband, Tom, says, “Little Brown tells us [it has] increased the run several times already based on advance interest and the fact that Hudson Booksellers, which stocks books in airports, has placed advance orders, which [it] did not do for either Factory Man or Truevine.”
Macy is not working on another book right now, he says, “partly because of increased demand relating to this book tour compared to the other two, and partly because this one took a lot out of her to report, but she is working on a few Dopesick-related projects for other outlets.”
Book sales at the Taubman event will be handled by Steger Creek, which is now operating the museum's gift shop. Steger Creek is owned and operated by Michael and Alex Pace, who established the fine gifts and collectibles boutique nearly 15 years ago.
Dan Smith is an award-winning Roanoke-based writer/author/photographer and a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame (Class of 2010). His blog, fromtheeditr.com, is widely read and he has authored seven books, including the novel CLOG! He is founding editor of a Roanoke-based business magazine and a former Virginia Small Business Journalist of the Year (2005).