Shaan Rao

Thesis

Shaan Ken Rao is a documentary/fine art photographer from New York City. He is half-Japanese and half-Pakistani.

The work begins with an image of Ken, a man I met at a small rehab in Northridge, Los Angeles and follows us throughout our 45-day stay from acute withdrawal and through our initial recovery. You’ll notice flash-forward and -backward moments of survival in bouts of drug abuse, as well as moments of clarity and reconciliation during abstinence.

I break away from typical documentary work by not trying to hide my bias towards the increasing dangers of addiction in this contemporary climate (synthetic drugs taking over the market, association with domestic violence and human trafficking, the implicit racism in the War on Drugs, etc.)

I pair these documentations with artistic iterations of the lived experiences of addiction. This pairing of different genres of photography while addressing the same topic allows me to depict a fuller story of the nuances of cycles of drug addiction. This is in opposition to the black-and-white mentality that is often used to look at addicts either through the lens of glorification, or one of inhumane disgust.

• Personal Website

• shaanrao.net