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'Ireally believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them," photographer Diane Arbus once wrote. It's a comment that came repeatedly to mind reading Hope in Shadows, a collection of photographs taken and stories told by residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The book, which comes out next month, grew from a popular program run over the past five years by the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit legal advocacy organization based in the neighbourhood. Since 2003, Pivot has been handing out cameras to residents and assembling pictures in a calendar. If you live or work in the downtown area, Gastown or Yaletown in particular, you've likely bought one of these from a street vendor at some point.

The book, edited by Vancouver poets Brad Cran and Gillian Jerome, takes the idea of the calendar a step further by building in the stories behind the images, as told by the people who took them. The result is likely to overturn a few "skid road" misconceptions, which reduce the citizens of the neighbourhood to mere emblems of its well-publicized problems: poverty, homelessness, prostitution, drug abuse and so on.

The book doesn't ignore these realities. Virtually every life story told here has been somehow damaged by one or more of the above. But the surprise, for many people, will be that the Downtown Eastside is also a community. Many residents like being here. And they seem to like each other, too.

"It's a vibrant community. People forget that children and families live here," writes Laurel Dykstra, whose photo of her twin four-year-old daughters was a prize winner in 2006. It's a reminder echoed poignantly by 12-year-old Elisha May Walker, whose picture Box Houses shows her friends tumbling around a driveway in a pair of cardboard boxes. Elisha's parents, activist Christians who have lived in the Downtown Eastside for 15 years, once let her stay with a friend up in the tony British Properties for a couple of months. She didn't like it. "You go over to the rich parts of Vancouver and no one will talk to you," she reports in the book.

The comment is modestly convicting of many people living in leafy, middle-class neighbourhoods. Certainly in my hood, Elisha wouldn't fare much better, given residents hardly talk to each other.

The contrast to the Downtown Eastside is striking. People not only talk to each other down here, they depend on one another. Few of these stories - read: few of these lives - do not rely at some point on the critical assistance of a friend, family member or stranger. Aaron's girlfriend and his mother stand by him through cocaine addiction, eviction, life on the streets and finally detox. Gary is crucially supported by a worker at the Carnegie Centre in the black weeks after he learns that the remains of his onetime fiancée Heather have been found on Robert Pickton's pig farm.

Common suffering does foster group identity, of course. If strangers don't embrace on street corners in Toronto's Forest Hill or Vancouver's Point Grey, maybe it's just that middle-class people see themselves as needing each other less than people do in a place with Third World hep C infection rates.

Mr. Cran and Ms. Jerome's experience compiling the book, underscores this common identity in another way. People weren't always easy to find. They had to post notes on billboards and search the streets. But once contacted, all but one agreed to speak. And while coming shyly at first, these stories then unfold with aching candour. As one woman put it to Mr. Cran: "I'm here to tell my story. I've been waiting my whole life to tell my story."

The comment speaks to how important this book will be in the neighbourhood. Mr. Cran and Ms. Jerome - partners, with two young children of their own - were repeatedly struck by the pride that the calendar and the book project have engendered. The voices of the neighbourhood speak, and the neighbourhood hears its own voice.

"It's important for the people in this community," Tom Quirk tells me, "because it makes them feel worthy of being heard."

Mr. Quirk, whose buddy Dennis died three months after he took the picture of him included in the book, is an example of a life redirected entirely by personal loss and recovery. Clean and sober three years, undergoing chemo for cancer, he now spends his days tramping the alleys trying to help. "Just getting people to take the next right step, getting to detox or seeing a nurse or even sometimes just to come in out of the rain for a while," he says, "that's what now sustains me."

The ghosts hover, the roll call of the lost - Alexis, Ember, Heather, Dennis, Gerald ... And yet Helen Hill can write: "Everyday somebody says I love you or people on the street blow me kisses or touch their heart, you know, and these are signs that mean I love you."

Or, as Bronwyn Elko puts it, explaining her own shot of a young man hugging a little girl on Hastings Street, "That is why I was happy to capture this photo, because I thought it did express love and that's made me happy - to think that people are going to look at it and go, 'This is the Downtown Eastside and by god there is love down there.' "

Timothy Taylor is a novelist and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest novel is Story House.