The famed American photographer’s haunting new series, documenting the places where other people died in clashes with police, is a quietly devastating commemoration and critique of modern American culture.
In their monochromatic austerity, Diana Matar’s photographs of American fashion have a melancholy undertone that is both familiar and unsettling. Whether it’s an abandoned highway covered in sunburnt grasses in a Texas countryside or a single-story liquor store in a sprawling California suburb, there’s a sense that those places, indescribable, aren’t places where locals tend to linger, let alone gather to grieve and reflect. Remember.
And yet, the 110 photographs in his new book, My America, show sites where civilians were killed by law enforcement officers in Texas, California, Oklahoma and New Mexico in 2015 and 2016. “I chose those 4 states because Texas and California are the places where most people die in confrontations with law enforcement,” he says, “while Oklahoma and New Mexico have the highest deaths in capita terms. I would have liked to shoot in other places like Chicago and Georgia, but I just didn’t have the cash anymore.
The cumulative effect of the book, however, lies not in the number of symbols it created, but in its haunted banality. They evoke an America devoid of the romance of highway videos and travelogues, a far more mundane landscape of homogenous suburbs. , functional municipal buildings, concrete churches, motels, and apartments. Here and there, the vastness and elemental beauty of the continent is glimpsed, but Matar focuses more commonly on the local, mundane environments in which many fatal encounters took place. Each symbol is accompanied by the victim’s name, year of birth and death, and location. Toward the end of the book, he includes an explanation of his method of study and a more extensive description of the cases that led to each murder.
“My painting is very much about memory and violence,” he tells me, “and the question I always try to answer is: What is on earth?What can you tell us? I like to think that I can’t extract anything from the landscapes and places where terrible violence has taken place, maybe even feel something tangible in those places, but this task has definitely challenged that. Again and again, I took pictures in places where I didn’t feel what was happening. there in a palpable way.
What he discovered was that the mundane nature of the position outweighed everything else. He visited more than three hundred sites during his travels, but only seven had a memorial. “It was as if those positions only made sense to other people who were very hooked. It depends on the victim,” he says. The fact that there has been no collective popularity may simply reflect our increasingly individualistic American culture, or possibly that such killings have become almost common in some states. Either way, it was unsettling to me. In a sense, the book, as the name suggests, is also about an America I grew up in and saw in a new light.
Matar grew up in Santa Clara County, California and graduated from the Royal College of Art in London. He has produced several works around themes of history, memory and state violence, adding his acclaimed 2014 project, Evidence, for which he travelled to Lithrougha to photograph the places where other people were killed or disappeared due to the secrecy of Colonel Gaddafi’s police. One of the missing people was his father-in-law, Jaballa Matar. She was accompanied by her husband, publisher Hisham Matar, and her mother. In an article Hisham Matar later wrote for the New Yorker, he noted, “Diana works with wonderful fidelity. Once he grabs a thread, he holds on to it until the end. This is still the case.
My America’s photographs were taken after several years of extensive studies of police killings in the United States, during which it drew on several online databases on the subject, adding to The Guardian’s in-depth investigation, The Counted. He made six trips throughout the 4 states, each lasting approximately three weeks. Traveling alone by car for long distances, she soon found herself quitting her old job. “In the past, I would shoot at dusk, when the light was at its atmospheric peak, but the distances I had to travel were so intimidating that I would start shooting at 6 a. m. and continue to another location at noon, when the light was low. The hardest part, because I was trying to get to the place where I was staying before dark.
All of the photographs in the e-book were taken with an iPhone 6 instead of the same old Hasselblad. “It was the best fit for the theme,” he explains, “not least because we became aware of those murders when they started. “being documented on camera phones through other people who witnessed them. “
Inevitably, the myriad nondescript sites documented through Matar are foreshadowed through the now-infamous police murders that spawned the collective anger and activism of the Black Lives Matter movement. Even though the names of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ahmaud Armory, and Breonna Taylor would possibly resonate throughout history, most of the victims analyzed in Matar’s latest collection of evidence remain unknown and not mourned, unless through their loved ones. This is perhaps the saddest subtext of this haunting – and haunted – e-book of evidence.
In her introduction, Matar poses a question that has preoccupied her in her professional life: “Can photographs carry the weight of history?I ask her if doing My America helped her find an answer. After some reflection, he says, “I think societies to bear the burden of history and want to enact legislation to make that happen. But photography, or writing, or even any artistic initiative that examines a subject up close and deep, is an act of sharp attention that necessarily means it matters.
He pauses again. Personally, I’m under no illusions that these paintings will replace anything, but in doing so, I emphasize that what happened to each of those other people really matters. This is vital because the afterlife has not disappeared. I know. This, not only because of my paintings, but also because of my own experience. I know what happens when someone is lost in the hands of the state. This has an effect on generations.
This article was amended on April 28, 2024 to correct a misspelling of Breonna Taylor’s name.
My America is published through GOST Books (£50). For The Guardian and The Observer, ask for your copy in Guardianbookshop. com. Shipping fees may apply.