Marc Asnin

“As the sun was setting it was fucking eerie, very unnerving, nothing has changed. The neighborhood’s still the same.” Eighteen years ago, I began shooting a 20-year documentary about my Uncle Charlie and the rest of my Brooklyn family. This no-holds-barred photographic epic concerns a unique family, my own. It’s a story of two generations and how problems move down the line. We see how my uncle deals with his burden of mental illness, and how he passes that burden to his children. Charlie never gives them the love they need. He doesn’t hug them, he doesn’t nurture them. He brings crackheads into the house. Everbody suffers from Charlie’s schizophrenia. Charlie and his children live with mental demons, with drugs, and with poverty. We watch these forces wreck Charlie and his family. I’ve been documenting one family for almost two decades. How else can one trace the long-term effects? We’ve had plenty of prosperity in America, but also twenty years of poverty, schizophrenia, desertion, AIDS, drugs and death. Welfare expenses are at a 30-year low,