Despair, Love and Loss:
A Journey Inside West Virginia’s Opioid Crisis
I met Mark at a portfolio review in 2018 where he showed me a stack of hundreds of photographs he had made over many years of documenting the lives of his friends at home in West Virginia, where many were gripped by opioid addiction. I proposed a collaboration on the spot and we spent months working through an edit that eventually told the story of Allie and her circle of friends.
When it came to writing the story, we worked with Campbell Robertson and decided that the most impactful and respectful way to tell the story was through Allie’s own words. She spent days talking with Cambell and in the end we put together Despair, Love and Loss, which not only won several journalistic awards, but was also cited in academic papers and directly influenced policy proposals.