The pictures in the book show Mariella's fellow addicts in various states of depravity, shooting up cocaine or smoking it on rooftops and in basement drug dens. The most lurid one shows a prostitute preparing to perform fellatio, presumably for crack money, while her toddler clings to her back. (Fortuitously or by plan, the scene of "The John, the Mother and the Child" is bracketed by pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall behind them.) Riding herd over the dissolute, the dead and the dying are young men with guns who run the street trade and who are themselves on the fast track, bound for the grave.

THE photographs are sensational enough, but the only thing that's new in them is crack. For 30 years, Americans have been treated to pictures of addicts shooting up, of young men wielding guns, of prostitutes plying their trade, nearly always with black folks as the subjects. What makes this book stunning is the text that attends the pictures. Mr. Richards and the reporter Edward Barnes do an extraordinary job of bringing us what the camera cannot. The voices of the addicts and their families come through in high fidelity; the narrative is icy and clear. The methodical accretion of detail reminds one of the lawyerly poet Charles Reznikoff.

No photograph could match this scene of the crack den: "Their basement apartment resembled a military bunker or a bomb shelter. There were no windows. The entryway was seven steep, narrow stairs below the sidewalk. . . . You stepped down through a storm door, then a second sturdier door into a kitchen, which was airless and dark, lit only by a trembling, dying fluorescent tube. Almost every night the users who huddled there created piles of litter, burnt matches, bloody cotton balls, scraps of toilet paper, bent needles. This morning, because it was still early, the table was swept clean."

Listen to Rita, who cares for her grandchildren because their mother, Joyce, is lost in crack: "I cry. I walk the floor. I cry. Joyce is gone . . . this generation is gone. . . . There is no more neighborhood here. I don't do coke, but now I dance to the music of drugs too. My grandkids, I tell them I sell weed. 'It's not the right thing to do, but Grandma has to take care of you, because the welfare check will not.' I explain this is how they get to private school, to keep them out the public school. It costs me $1,780 a year to get my grandson into a Christian private school. Same thing with my granddaughter.

"So who's left out here on the streets with me? My grandmother used to have a saying that when hell full up, the dead will walk the earth. We're seein' it now. They are the dead. Look at 'em."

Here's the last word from an addict named Joe: "What keeps you from dying is you run out of money."

Reading and looking, I couldn't help wonder: why are nearly all of the people in these photographs black? The vast majority of drug addicts in America are white. This could be said of any phenomenon in the United States, of course, but why is the white aspect of drug addiction so consistently invisible?

The drugs that flood impoverished neighborhoods certainly don't originate there. Where are the faces of those who import them, the well-to-do chemists who earn piles of money by turning out the product? Couldn't Mr. Richards have found a setting where most or at least half of the drug addicts were white? The Hartford Courant did, in "Streets of Despair," its series two years ago about drug addiction in its city. Courant staff members say that readers were surprised to see that 70 percent of the addicts depicted were white. Bombarded for years with images of black depravity, they had come to believe that drug addiction was a black problem exclusively.