Tobias Zielony, TRONA: ARMPIT OF AMERICA, 2012

Berlin-based photographer Tobias Zielony has visited the small, ramshackle Californian chemistry city because it is ‘possibly the worst place in America, if not the world’, to quote a blog; his pictures show a small town entirely in the grasp of producers, dealers and consumers of a crystalline drug that keeps people on their toes for days and lets them age decades in the course of a mere few months. Chemists call it methamphetamine, addicts call it ‘crystal’, or ‘meth’, or both; politicians call it the new American pandemic.