The women aimed their cameras at precious children and faithless lovers, falling-down apartments and asthma nebulizers.
They also shot empty grocery carts and unstocked refrigerators, sewage puddling in the street, clouds and sky (to show elusive freedom, Chilton said), and food-stamp forms and child-care subsidy paperwork, because to be poor is to be, among other things, a harried bookkeeper.
At turns hopeful and desolate, the Witnesses pictures are the unvarnished view of blunt women whose life visions have been planed down to their irreducible essence.
The women know Philadelphia better than they want to.
"My 4-year-old son saw a shot person and has prostitutes in his face," Tianna Gaines, 29, said in an Inquirer interview in her crowded apartment. "This is not The Cosby Show. That wasn't a stunt double dead in front of my son. I know a woman who sells her body to buy Pampers. This is the real world."
Chilton's aim was to have the women illustrate their crushing circumstances to policy makers - the daily hurt of hunger and the myriad ways, she said, that government fails poor children. The 40 were allowed to keep the cameras and were paid up to $125 each.
"These women are experts, with something to teach," said Chilton, 40, a nationally recognized authority on hunger who lived and worked in Chile and in Oklahoma, among the southern Cheyenne. She's also the principal investigator of the Philadelphia GROW Project, which she founded to improve children's growth and nutrition.
"Some people think the poor deserve their fate," Chilton added. "That kind of thinking kills off a generation."
Erica Smalley, 24, an unmarried mother of two who works for Comcast, turned the camera on herself as she was crying.
