“Before moving to Edinburgh, everything I knew about the city was from Trainspotting,” says New York-born photographer, Yoshi Kametami, who moved there to study at the College of Art. “I was fascinated with the stories of the underground working-class heroin culture, and I wanted to know what kind of environment had influenced Irvine Welsh to write the book. I had found out that he was raised in Muirhouse, and some of the stories in the book took place in the council scheme. And that’s why I ended up there.”

Kametami spent four years shooting Plastic Spoon on the notorious housing estate, which has been plagued with a major drugs problem since the early 1980s. The title refers ironically to the privileged few born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and also to the utensil most commonly used for cooking up heroin, but it was sparked by his observation that most of his subjects survived on take away food eaten with plastic cutlery.

“In the US, we focus a lot on racial discrimination, and in my eyes the equivalent to that in Britain is the class divide. You can tell right away if someone is from the schemes by the way they talk, the way they walk, and the way they dress. You even have words to describe a person from the estates, like chav, ned or schemey.”

Gaining the trust of people on the schemes and developing friendships that opened up a wider circle of subjects, he worked in the style of a visual anthropologist, collecting photographs, video, audio and artefacts in the belief that “the more types of information you organise and present, the clearer the communication between you and your audience”. The pictures on his website, which he plans to turn into a publication, are accompanied by texts, “kept as simple as possible, almost like a children’s book”, and organised into short series focused on individuals such as Mikey in Flat 15, who traded in his motorbike for a cannabis plant.

“Towards the end of four-year project, I started to realise that I was becoming desensitised to the things that would have made me feel extremely uncomfortable, like people doing heroin in front of me with a baby in the room. But even though there are a lot of negative things that can be pointed out about Muirhouse, there is a great sense of community. Everyone knows each other and helps each other out. And if you think about it, I am this Japanese/Chinese/American kid just walking around on the street with cameras around my neck, and no one ever tried to rob or threaten me. People were just as curious about me as I was about them. And some of them actually invited me to their homes to have a cup a tea.”