Looking at their photo of railroad tracks, a group of pre-teen students in South Central Los Angeles see either a way out of the ghetto, or a dirty, bad environment. Such are the impressions expressed in the poignant We Live in the Shadow: Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs. In Elaine Bell Kaplan's perceptive book, at-risk youth were given five-dollar cameras to tell stories about their world. Their photos and stories show us their response to negative inner-city teen images. We follow them into their schools, and we hear about their creative coping strategies. While these kids see South Central as dangerous, they also see themselves as confident enough not to let the inner-city take them down. They refuse to be labelled as ghetto thugs, as outsiders sometimes do. These outsiders include police, teachers, and other groups representing the institutional voices governing their daily lives.

For the African-American community the image of the teenage mother is especially troublesome: all the problems of the welfare systsem seem to spotlight the black teenage mom. This text dispels common percetions of these young women. The author's interviews with the women themselves, and with their mothers and grandmothers, provide a picture of their lives caught in the intersection of race, class and gender. Kaplan challenges the assumption conveyed in the popular media that the African-American community condones teen pregnancy, single parenting, and reliance on welfare. Especially telling are the feelings of frustration, anger and disappointment expressed by the mothers and grandmothers interviewed. And in listening to teenage mothers discuss their problems, Kaplan hears first hand of their relationships with men, and their difficulties with the education system - all factors bear heavily on their status as young parents. Kaplan's own personal experience as an African-American teenage mother adds a personal dimesion to this book, and she offers proposals for rethinking and assessing the class factors, gender relations, and racism that influence black teenagers to become mothers.