Darcy Padilla

In February 1993, Darcy Padilla was photographing a team of doctors and social workers in San Francisco who cared for people with AIDS who were too sick to make it to a clinic. She envisioned the story as an updated urban version of W. Eugene Smith’s epic 1948 photo essay “Country Doctor.”

While waiting for the doctors in the lobby of a rundown S.R.O. hotel in the Tenderloin district, Ms. Padilla, then 26, encountered Julie Baird, 19. Her pants were unzipped and she held an eight-day-old baby. That chance meeting would lead Ms. Padilla on a journey that would last the rest of her subject’s lifetime.

“In doing this, my point has been is to look how incredibly difficult this kind of poverty is,” Ms. Padilla said. She recalled:

When I first met Julie, she told me how she ran away at age 14, lived on the streets and found out that she had AIDS when she was pregnant with Rachel. Jack, her partner at the time, also had AIDS. And the new birth had, in their words, given them a reason to live. Julie was dealing with issues of manic depression and within a year, struggled to stop using speed. I think the heart of the story is a young woman who had been abused as a girl from age six to when she ran away at 14 by jumping out of a second-story window. And then ended up meeting Jack. And I just kept going back and knocking at the door, and slowly, this relationship began. But it was still distant. And the relationship I have with her really didn’t begin until after she left Jack, which would have been late 1994.

Ms. Padilla continued to follow Ms. Baird through her struggle with AIDS; the birth of five more children, with two other men; a kidnapping; her imprisonment; and a move to Alaska.

Fittingly, Ms. Padilla received the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography on Wednesday for telling the story of Ms. Baird. This is not Ms. Padilla’s longest term project. She has been photographing in prisons since 1990.

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Ms. Padilla spent much of September photographing Ms. Baird in Alaska. But this time was different. Ms. Baird was receiving home hospice care. She died in her sleep in the early morning of Sept. 27. One might think that this would be the last chapter of the journey that the two young woman started in San Francisco in 1993.

But for Ms. Padilla, the story is not over. She wants to find Ms. Baird’s other children and raise money to pay for their education. “It’s important to ask them about her life and why her choice to give them up happened,” Ms. Padilla said, “and to tell them that it wasn’t their fault.”