the ninth floor

Jessica Dimmock;The Ninth Floor

In 2004, anywhere from 20 to 30 young addicts lived on the ninth floor of an elegant narrow building overlooking Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The squatters had turned the sprawling apartment into a dark, desperate and chaotic place. People hustled, scored, shot and smoked wherever they could. Friends conned each other for their next hit. They slept on piles of clothes on the floor. The power was shut off; the bathroom unusable; the kitchen filled with garbage. Anything of value was sold off...
(excerpt from Mediastorm.com)

I am not too familiar with the current trends of documentary photography (I think I got lost somewhere in the magnum era) Perhaps that's why the 'Ninth Floor' comes to me as jarring and unorthodox. The moody photographs are often dull and grainy, out of focus or blurred by motion; they defied all the capabilities of what technology brings to photography nowadays.

Some might dislike the 'Ninth Floor' series, call it technically incompetent, manipulative and all sorts of other names. But I like it. In fact, I like the entire series quite a bit. I find the approach work extremely well for such an intense story, and the use of such a raw edginess is fully justified.

I wonder if one would consider Dimmock's method to be manipulative and overly romanticised, like pictoralism? Where does one draw the line between a representation of truth and manipulation?