Pictures of Dead Things [excerpt]
It was New York City, in August, the heat outside was unbearable, and we were here in a stifled apartment building, sleazy and crawling with all sorts of human scum. Outside we could feel the suffering of millions of people seeping in.
I took my camera off from around my neck, and in one moment while caught off guard from a sudden noise I dropped it in the bath tub.
I was in shock, the bath tub was filled to the brim with black slime, bones prodded out of a decaying human soup within the walls of the tub. A woman had died here and was cooked in the bath. After I fished out my camera I vomited into my respirator.
We were here, on assignment to photograph the scene, and were wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, the smell was absolutely, indescribably terrible.
Looking back on it now, I had thought this was the worst moment of my life, but I am not entirely sure. Yet of all the awful events I've witnessed in my time photographing crime scenes for the NYPD, this was certainly my lowest ebb, where I had stumbled directly into another person's most humiliating fate and foolishly claimed it for my own.
Standing here, in an art gallery, looking at all these pictures makes these events feel different, detached, and strangely voyeuristic from events that I had physically experienced.
I feel cheap, and I am a fraud. I have exploited my job, and my public duty, but most of all I have exploited people at their most vulnerable, as scrambled meat on the sidewalk, as beaten and bruised steak, as shot and stabbed victims left for abandon, or in the case above, human stew.
I was selfish, and I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to show others the awful burden of my job, and of the awful ways that humans treat each other, except now I stand here alone before my public duty feeling as if I had betrayed those very individuals I had sought to protect.
Before I took photos for evidence, I took photos for art, I wanted to be a professional photographer, and the bleak realities of life had beaten all of the idealistic ambitions out of me, so I got into law enforcement. A job which was practical, and allowed me to tell myself that my profession served a moral purpose.
I had surrounded myself with racists and sadists and thugs hiding behind the dignity of a blue uniform. All to cherish the misery and helplessness of people, shoot a black kid in "self-defense" then give an ice cream cone to a child and pat them on the head and say some scripted lines about freedom and justice while you mug for the camera. All the vile sociopathy of exploiting the weak under the auspices of protecting them. Juvenile masculine power fantasies run rampant, my friends shoot "bad guys" when there are no good guys to compare them to. Everyone without power is worse than them.
Someone unloved and lonely dies in a fucking slum with no one to check on them, until they start to smell, and then the entire building has me come over to clean up their mess, never mind the fact that they hoarded their pets with them in their agoraphobia-barricade, and their starving cats turned on them, leaving a horribly mutilated skeleton for me to photograph while holding my bile down.
Sometimes with this job, well after it beats you down, you start to like it. You find people that have died in spectacular poses, blood and offal arranged in a photogenic way. Beauty in scarlet and violet and black, beauty in vulnerability, in being a precious victim of the sorrow and tumult of the human species. A rope around a gentle neck, a broken heart. Razors and quiet fury in a red bathtub surrounded by pills and a fervent scramble for meaning or empathy. Furious anger and betrayal in violent murders. Hatred and sadness and pain all wrapped up in one final act upon someone for me to immortalize their mortal fate. And I have come here, unknown and unprepared for, to the most intimate moment of their life in order to take it away from them. To trespass upon their most sacred ground, and to preserve it in a way that seems as selfish as it is blasphemous to them. I love my job, there is nothing like it in the entire world.
