Photographer and former heroin addict Graham MacIndoe had a hunch he might make for a good subject behind his own lens upon catching his reflection one day in a bathroom mirror.
"I just looked so, you know, not myself," he told HuffPost Live's Ricky Camilleri. "And I just felt compelled to capture that, you know, not knowing where the pictures would take me.
"And then once I started taking the pictures I felt really compelled to keep taking these pictures to record what I was going through..." he continued. "So that if I came through, I could show it to other people and show them exactly what I'd been through in that period of my life, which was a very harrowing time for me."
While aware of MacIndoe's pain at the time, his girlfriend Susan Stellin said the photographs offered an even more haunting narrative for her.
"This was a world that I knew existed," she told HuffPost Live. "...I knew it was happening but I hadn't seen what went on behind those closed doors or what Graham looked like. So it was one of those things where you could not not look because I hadn't been part of that experience. It was a separate world."
MacIndoe's series consists of 342 self-portraits, Stellin detailed in an article for New York Magazine, and she feels these photos are valuable a wider audience in offering an unobstructed first-person view into the hardships of addiction.
"...I think we do need to see it, and try to understand addiction from the inside," she writes. "... No one else is in the pictures; drugs have replaced everyone and everything that used to matter"
Watch the rest of the HuffPost Live interview below:
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