When Bruce Gilden started to photograph the drug-addicted sex workers in Miami, he was confronted with the memory of his mother, who killed herself when he was a young man

Bruce Gilden got on with Texas, a sex worker, immediately. “We just sparked up a connection,” he says. “Once upon a time, I might have wound up in a room with her doing drugs.”

The pair had met during one of Gilden’s first visits to Overtown. He had been visiting the deprived, sun-bleached Miami enclave since 2013 to take portraits and interview the women there whose addiction issues led to sex work. One such portrait captures Texas strutting past a brightly coloured wall. Her makeup is carefully administered, her dress and jewellery vibrant, her handbag covered in pop art iconography. A cigarette dangles precariously from her lips. She’s enjoying the camera. “She looks like a fashion model,” Gilden points out, “until you see the marks on her arm.”

Gilden felt he could confide in Texas and told her the story of his mother, a picturesque 1950s housewife from Brooklyn who, behind closed doors, was hooked on prescription drugs. He told her about his own struggles with addiction. Texas responded: “I’ll stop doing [drugs] when I don’t enjoy it no longer.” The next time Gilden arrived in Overtown, he asked after Texas. She wasn’t around any more, the other women told him. She had taken an overdose and died.

Gilden, 72, is well known for taking such stark, uncompromising portraits. It’s a signature that has served him well, and his photographs are frequently exhibited in some of the world’s biggest art institutions. But he has taken plenty of heat, too. His photographs have, even in these pages, been likened to a “latterday freak show”. He has been accused of creating portraits that “are so unforgiving and intrusive they dehumanise the subjects”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alice, from Overtown, Miami in Only God Can Judge Me. Photograph: Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos

Gilden has never spoken publicly of how his childhood experiences drove him to create the portraits. The women of Overtown changed that, convincing him to speak openly and for the first time of the trauma that underpins his work. “In the faces of these women, I find echoes of my own mother’s story,” Gilden says.

A tattoo inked across the breast of a woman named Jessica gave the series its name: Only God Can Judge Me. That’s also the title of a book of the images, published by London-based Browns Editions, run by artist and designer Jonathan Ellery. “By talking about what happened to his mum, Bruce is showing us where his photographs really come from,” Ellery says. “He didn’t need to give us that insight. It was his decision to do so. And it changes everything.”

Gilden was born in Brooklyn in 1946. His father, Daniel, was a “tough guy, a mafioso-type figure” – a streetwise New Yorker with gold rings arranged on his fingers and a cigar always to hand. “And my mother was pretty, your average housewife,” he says.

“But I would hear my parents talk in their room at night. The conversations were too disturbing and graphic to be discussed publicly. I heard things that no child should ever know.” He remembers, after such arguments, Pauline bursting into his room with cigarette burns on her chest. On other occasions, he can remember “seeing her in the middle of the afternoon going up the stairs with a man in the house where we lived”.

“Witnessing all of this was devastating,” he says. “I felt ashamed, hurt, completely at a loss – but I couldn’t stop listening, no matter how much it hurt. And I wouldn’t say anything to anybody – because I was brought up by my father’s mafioso code of silence and secrecy.”

He kept this chapter of his life resolutely private, until he met the women of Only God Can Judge Me. Photographing these women, and indeed photography in general, has been a form of catharsis. “I don’t do this to exploit people,” he says. “It’s who I am. I’ve seen it in my own home to some degree. What I photograph is what I lived.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the women from Only God Can Judge Me in Overtown, Miami. Photograph: Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos

After setting himself up as a New York street photographer, Gilden found himself seeking out the city’s misfits, down-and-outs and left-behinds. But as his recognition grew he started to struggle with addiction himself. His mother’s problems were also growing, and by the time Gilden had turned 30, she had been detained in a secure psychiatric unit. Gilden remembers taking the train out to the secure unit to visit her one Christmas. He took a portrait of her “when she weighed about 80 pounds, because she was starving herself to death”. He has kept the portrait, but has never shown it to anyone.

Several years later, only two short weeks after the death of his father, Gilden received a call: his mother had killed herself in the asylum.

“I didn’t do anything to help her,” he says. “That’s when I really went off the end (with drugs). I went on a bender. It was too much for me to handle.”

Gilden has since made a life for himself – he’s now clean, happily married and living in Beacon, a forest-ringed city in Dutchess County, New York state. But Only God Can Judge Me brought memories of his past back to him.

If someone can look at these and feel like they’re not alone in the world, then I’ve done my job Bruce Gilden

For the first time in his career, he decided to couple his portraits with quotes from the women photographed. The words are as unsparing as his portraits. Trish, an older Jewish woman, told Gilden: “I was one of those ladies who lunch, a married woman. Then I started taking pain pills at the age of 30 because I have chronic pain. I had never taken a drug prior to that and I said, ‘Oh my God, I feel so much better!’ And that was it. That got a hold on me and this is where I wound up.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I was brought up by my father’s mafioso code of silence and secrecy’ … Bruce Gilden in London last year.

Jessica, a dark-haired woman with the tattoo, told Gilden: “I have been on the street since I was 14. I’m 39 now. I started using drugs with my parents, who were addicts and dealers. I thought it was normal. I was put in foster homes but I kept running away. I would always find myself in these areas. I never knew what I was running from, but now I know I was just looking for guidance. I never had that.”

A younger woman, April, told Gilden of being raped as a child by her grandfather. “I tried to tell my parents once, but they didn’t believe me. I got in trouble so I never brought it up again until his funeral, when I walked up to his casket and spit in his face and told everyone.”

Gilden hopes these images might give someone slipping into addiction a moment of pause. “If someone can look at these and feel like they’re not alone in the world, then I’ve done my job,” he says. But there’s something else at play here – a defiant stare at those who have so manifestly misunderstood his work.

A latter-day freak show? Bruce Gilden's extreme portraits are relentlessly cruel Read more

“These women – they’re not just left behind, they’re invisible,” Gilden says. “I like to make people look at them – to make them see. A lot of people have difficulty with that. And that always interests me. Why would you not want to look at these faces? Because this can happen to anyone’s loved one.”

The book is dedicated to Gilden’s wife, Sophie, his daughter Nina and, on a separate page, “for my mother”. “It has taken me my whole life to deal with what happened to her,” Gilden says. Meeting the women of Overtown “gave me the courage to face it. I owe them a lot for that.”

• Only God Can Judge Me is available from Browns Editions



