For more than 10 years, journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent countless hours with a multigenerational group of people in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Bronx, New York, recording events in their lives from the mundane to the traumatic. Her intimate, unsparing yet empathetic account of those years, which focuses primarily on two young women who struggle daily in the face of deprivation and shifting circumstances, was published by Scribner in January 2003 and was immediately hailed by critics as one of the most important books in years on social conditions in the United States.
LeBlanc discussed her book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, at a forum at OSI's New York offices on February 26, 2003. She was joined by Brenda Ann Kenneally, a photographer whose work has dealt with many of the same issues over the past several years. Kenneally's photographs were featured in a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from the book. Kenneally and LeBlanc are both Soros Justice Media Fellows. Kenneally's work is included in the current Moving Walls documentary photography show at OSI's New York headquarters; those photographs highlight people who are struggling to cope with drug use, urban poverty, and similar issues that LeBlanc writes about in her book.
The forum was moderated by Terry Williams, Ph.D., chairman of the Department of Sociology at the New School University in New York City.