Foley Gallery is pleased to announce the first New York exhibition of photojournalist Jessica Dimmock.

Jessica Dimmock began photographing her series “The Ninth Floor” after being approached by a New York City drug dealer several years ago. She was in the midst of completing her degree at the International Center of Photography for Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. She became interested in photographing the dealer and his daily deliveries. One such stop was the ninth-floor of an elegant apartment building in New York’s Flatiron district. For the next two and a half years Dimmock settled in as a long-term observer to candidly record the consumptive and consumed lives of nearly thirty heroin addicts in their eroding, claustrophobic home.

”...the mood inside was muffled, slow, secretive and sick, becalmed by a septic hush,” Dimmock recalls, and though her vivid portrait of that decaying place, with no light and duct-taped walls indeed silences its voyeur, it is her relentless documentation of the human lives struggling through and surviving addiction that impact upon us so profoundly.

Caught between the unaffected, objective nature of journalism and the heart-felt feelings for her subjects, Dimmock reflects how, ”...the strange contradictions of this work are such that a mutual trust is built…but that very trust eventually undermines the arms-length neutrality of the documentarian.”

A selection of more than forty chromogenic prints from Dimmock’s series will be exhibited. The photographs lay bare the privacy and unmentionables of this three-bedroom apartment; its afflicted tenants silhouetting through smoke-clouds, wading in piles of waste, lampshades, bottles, cardboard boxes, and needles.

Jessica Dimmock is a graduate of The International Center of Photography. Her work has appeared in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Fortune, New York Magazine and Fader. She received the F award for Concerned Photography from Forma and Fabrica, the Inge Morath Award from Magnum, the Marty Forsher Fellowship for Documentary Photography from PDN and the Juror’s Choice Award for the Project Competition from the Santa Fe Center for Photography. In the winter of 2008 Jessica became a member of the VII Network, a division of the VII Photo agency. Jessica lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.