Searching for Hope and Humanity in L.A.

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

In late 1994, Joseph Rodriguez was in the back of a Los Angeles police car, a cramped space that jarred loose equally uncomfortable memories. As a young man in Brooklyn he had been arrested for robbing houses up and down his block to support his heroin habit.

But this time he was walking â€" and running â€" alongside the police in Los Angeles as they patrolled streets where gangs and drugs had left entire neighborhoods in grief and chaos. He was there to photograph a story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine about how the L.A.P.D. was trying to deal with the violence on the streets while attempting to clean up a reputation that had been sullied by the Rodney King beating.

“Papito, it was weird,” Mr. Rodriguez said in his usual hip and hyper way. “I didn’t have the best love for the police. I’m very guarded. But I knew this story was bigger than me. It felt strange to be working the other side with the police, when I had been handcuffed myself. When I sat in the back of the police car it was a disorienting feeling.”

Yet in another way it was one that he was able to channel into empathy, as he plumbed what the police and local residents were facing. It was a time of out-of-control violence that was being met with a police strategy of coming down hard. It allowed Mr. Rodriguez to find ways to relate to the civilians he was photographing: reminding him of hard-luck lives he had witnessed back in Brooklyn or El Barrio.

Joseph Rodriguez Officer Edwards backed up his partner Officer Dona they make a stop to check out gang members. Two of the notorious gangs were in the Rampart Division, the 18th Street Gang and Mara Salvatrucha MS-13.

“I don’t think the L.A.P.D. story was just one that I illustrated,” he said. “There was a psychological experience that came up from the past. When you photographed domestic violence, you see your other, your aunt, yourself. You go to places where there are a lot of drugs. I know what drugs are about. My experiences got me closer to this story.”

His time with the L.A.P.D. had come not long after he had spent two years living in Los Angeles photographing gang members for what would be published as “East Side Stories.” That had involved serious immersion on the other side, which began almost as a challenge by Little Igor, a 12-year-old gang member he had befriended. Mr. Rodriguez was working with Black Star at the time, and was about to cut short his gang project in L.A. to go on assignment to Bosnia.

“This kid is 12 years old and he says to me, ‘Why go to Bosnia? There’s a Bosnia right here,’ ” Mr. Rodriguez recalled with a short laugh. “So, I stayed in L.A.”

He had started the gang project riding along with anti-gang units that went into housing projects to round up veteranos â€" old timers â€" whose affiliations spanned decades. He established connections with some of the gangs, and would often give them pictures to maintain their trust. But that tactic proved dangerous.

“One night the cops raided this house where I had been photographing a lot,” he said. “They took some of my photos along with a gun they found in the house. They told these kids I was working with them, and I had a contract put on my life. At that point I wrote in my journal I was going to give this up.”

Joseph Rodriguez Rampart Officers Barker and Dona checked the house of a family of a man who was shot by a gang member in his living room.

Instead, he wound up going to another neighborhood and, with the help of a social worker, hooked up with another gang. They tested him by putting a gun in his face, then accepted him when they discovered he had been photographing their sworn enemies from another clique.

From then on, he said, he stayed away from working with the police.

Returning in late 1994 to document the police was understandably difficult. But it was also a way for him to delve deeper, even if what the police were saying - about the importance of working with the community - didn’t always jibe with what played out before him.

What has always been important to him, he said, was going beyond the immediate image to get at the “quiet violence” that runs rampant in some communities.

“I’m looking at physical violence, but I’m also looking at the violence of letting families fall apart,” he said. “The violence of unemployment. The issues that keep things crazy. It was always important for me to keep that violence in perspective. You can say I was there as a photographer and photographed the violence in front of me. But it was much deeper. I was looking at that personally, as the father of two young girls. I’m looking at these families that had no recourse, no papers and no way to express this nightmare they are going through.”

Whether he liked it or not, he said, the families he photographed wanted him to tell their stories. He has stayed in touch with them, and in the past year has returned to Los Angeles several times to bring their sagas up to date. He found Little Igor, as well as his mother and uncles. He found some guys who were still in the life or in prison.

“You could see some guys were still connected, still had the guns,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for some kind of hope. As somebody who redeemed himself, I have always been interested in that journey.”

Little Igor is not so little anymore: he is a heavyset father of four approaching 40. Others are in the same situation, trying to live a life beyond the chaos of the past. Some of them were motivated by fear â€" tough laws made the consequences of gang life much rougher to handle. Others walked away from the violence after losing friends or children.

“These guys have families,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “That’s what changed them. You should hear them! We are at this picnic and one was talking about his daughter in high school. Another talked about what his son was doing. I saw changes in them.”

Mr. Rodriguez hopes to take his recent work â€" for which he also did videotaped interviews â€" and produce a multimedia project that builds on his decades among the gangs of Los Angeles. He wants to show something beyond the usual images of desperate people who are often seen as victims with no subtlety â€" or dignity.

“It’s the same story,” he said. “It’s the same as in the Bronx. We’re still doing the same story. For me, I just want to talk about family, how we are and how we’re navigating our way through these communities.”

Joseph Rodriguez Exhausted at 4 a.m. at the Rampart office.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.