LIVING WITH THE ENEMY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DONNA FERRATO
INTRODUCTION BY DR. ANN JONES
APERTURE; 1991

Ferrato rode over 6,000 hours with police around the country to get some of the photographs in Living With the Enemy. In the introduction to Living With the Enemy, Ferrato writes, “Much of the book was born out of frustration — first, because I felt powerless in the face of the violence I had seen, and second, because for a long time no magazine would publish the pictures. It was only when I received the W. Eugene Smith Award in 1986 that magazine editors began to take the project seriously.” Ferrato felt the problem had been concealed from public view for too long and it was important to show as many aspects of the problem as she could. Some of the names in the book were changed, but all of the photographs and stories are real.

REVIEWS

“Living With the Enemy is vital for educating the public to the national crisis that is much the American way of life."
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

"Living with the Enemy is both harrowing and moving. With their shocking immediacy, these photographs offer the kind of urgent call to action provided by all great documentary photographs."
Charles Hagen, The New York Times

"A gripping work of photojournalism. . . . The photographer's straight-on-style never exaggerates or sensationalizes."
People magazine

"Living with the Enemy is a book that is difficult to pick up and impossible to put down. It is a book that will completely transform assumptions about battered women and the men who abuse them."
Elizabeth Hess, The Women's Review of Books

"Ferrato's grim achievement is to tear down the curtain, revealing ordinary women--and yes, the men who batter them--in desperately ordinary kinds of pain. . . [It is] a new kind of work: journalism focused on intimate domestic affairs; combat photography in the home."
The Washington Post

"With great force and compassion, Ferrato has traced domestic violence against women from its ambiguous social origins to its most violent physical manifestations. Her stark black-and-white photographs and straightforward text constitute a work of far-reaching sociological and photographic significance."
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