From Righteous Dopefiend, now on view at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. (Photography by Jeff Schonberg)

As the sun went down one evening over San Francisco’s shipyards, the anthropologist Philippe Bourgois came across a man in a drug-induced seizure under the intersection of two freeways. Bourgois was only a few months into a 12-year research project on homeless heroin addicts, a journey that would make him a habitué of vacant factories, dead-end alleyways, storage lots, and broken-down cars. Read More