No Easy Walk

Helen M. Stummer is a New Jersey-based photographer whose work is included in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Photography and Photojournalism at the County College of Morris and a photography instructor at the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts.

• Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: The Transformation of Newark Photographs 1. Carol's World 2. Home Sweet Home 3. Survivin' 4. No Easy Walk Epilogue

"No Easy Walk is enormously moving....The author nicely avoids the customary condescension of too many visitors in poor communities and infuses Newark's Central Ward with all the mixture of sorrow and courage that its residents display and obviously deserve....I hope the book is widely read."-Jonathan Kozol "No Easy Walk tells us the story of growing up in Newark. It does so with love, concern, and respect through the medium of wonderful photography."-Monsignor William J. Linder, Founder, New Communities Corporation, Newark "In her extraordinary odyssey through the seemingly hopeless inner-city environs of contemporary Newark, Helen Stummer discovered the tenacity of spirit that has characterized the lives of poor black Americans over the past generation. Her stories on the private experiences of these people, the anonymous victims of Newark's decline, are told with profound empathy and insight; her photographic documentation of them, their homes and streets, are at once honorable and moving. No Easy Walk is an important contribution to the imaging of black life under enormous pressure and to our understanding of the nation's desperately intractable dilemma of urban poverty."-Clement Alexander Price, Professor of History, Rutgers University