A photographer spent years remembering around 300 sites of fatal police shootings across America

CNN
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In 2015 alone, 1,146 people died during or after interactions with police officers in the US. In 2016, the death toll was 1,093, according to The Counted, a special report and database compiled by the Guardian. (In both years, the vast majority of deaths were classified as the result of gunshot wounds; only a few deaths were caused by Taser use or collisions with police vehicles, or reported as “deaths in custody.”)

For photographer Diana Matar, attempting to honor these deaths—and the frontiers they represent—was a project too much to ask, even on a smaller scale. She focused on four states: California and Texas, because they had the most such incidents nationwide, and Oklahoma and New Mexico, because they consistently had the highest per capita rates.

“I thought I could photograph every encounter in these four states in two years, but that just became impossible,” Matar told CNN. “Time-wise, financially, in every possible way.”

Yet during his roughly three-year photo journey, Matar drove hundreds of miles across the four states and visited more than 300 sites where people had died during (or after) an encounter with police officers in 2015 and 2016. 110 of those images are now published in the monograph “My America”; quiet, monochrome images of everyday places like parking lots, country roads and suburban sidewalks.

Grass patches on an empty roadside mark the spot where 40-year-old Terence Crutcher was killed by a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2016. In Addison, Texas, birds perched on telephone wires overlook the spot where 16-year-old Jose Cruz was murdered by an off-duty police officer that same year. (In 2018, the officer was sentenced to 10 years in prison after being found guilty of murder and aggravated assault.) Two chairs on a sunny sidewalk in Los Angeles, California, mark the spot where 37-year-old Norma Guzman was shot and killed by police officers in 2015.

Next to each picture in the book are three short lines of biographical information: the name of the deceased, their year of birth and death, and their location.

“I was really adamant about how the photos were going to be presented. I just wanted it to be a name,” said Matar, who counseled victims’ families and support groups. “I didn’t want the last thing you think about these people to be the way they died. These were people with lives.”

“There are so many images, and so many images of violence that we kind of shut down,” Matar added, reflecting on today’s age of social media and smartphones. “I think we need space to process that, and I wanted to approach that in a fairly calm way. I wanted images that didn’t reinforce the violence. I wanted images that you could look at and imagine that this very mundane place was the last place someone had been.”

Matar is an internationally recognized photographer and distinguished artist at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City. Her relationship with documenting landscapes and violence is rooted in her own personal experiences. In 1990, her father-in-law was forcibly disappeared by the Gaddafi regime in Libya and his family never saw him again. “I was familiar with this idea of ​​the legacy of state-sponsored violence and its immediate impact on a family… but I was also able to really look at it through photography and what these landscapes were saying,” Matar said.

Matar was born in California but has lived abroad for nearly two decades. Her photographic work has taken her to places in Libya, North Africa, Italy and Ukraine, where she has explored the intersections of landscape and memory, particularly places where people were killed or forcibly interned. But before she began working on My America, she had never turned her lens on the United States.

In 2014 and 2015, police killings of black men and boys, including Eric Garner in New York City, 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked nationwide protests and a racial reckoning on video and social media. Matar felt compelled to return to America. “I had been working outside of my home country for many years on issues around violent landscapes and state violence, and I wanted to start exploring what was happening (in the U.S.) from that perspective.”

Matar used a range of sources – including victim databases, media reports, prosecutor documents and police reports – and created her work during six long car rides. She would watch videos or local news reports of what was happening at the location before photographing the sites in question. “It was really emotional,” she said.

“Every time I got out of the car, I was very aware that I wasn’t just photographing a landscape or a building. I was photographing something that captured the last moments of someone’s life – unless the person was taken to the hospital, it was the place where these deaths occurred. It made me think about my country and question so many things.”

Of all the places Matar visited, she said, only seven had any kind of memorial, be it a mural, flowers, memorabilia or photographs. In some ways, though, the photographs and the information accompanying them in “My America” ​​have their own monument-like quality; Matar stresses that this was a conscious decision in the design of the book. “I wanted a lot of white space there because I wanted the viewer to sit and think, not just move on quickly,” she said.

While the biographical information next to each photo is sparse, Matar has researched and written a lengthy section of text devoted to the life and death of each person, which can be found on the final pages of the book.

She describes her research into the wider issues surrounding police-related deaths as “even more poignant” than the process of creating the photographs. This is illustrated in a series of pages in the middle of the book that list key statistics on such deaths, those affected and the factors involved – such as that the number of people who die each year in encounters with police (around 1,000) has not changed in the nine years since Matar began researching the project in 2015.

“When you look at all the reasons for this – the lack of psychiatric beds, the lack of weapons training, the racial injustice – there are so many things that come together in this particular challenge,” Matar said. “This book puts this kind of violence in the same category as many other acts of violence in the country’s history.”

“I have no illusions that this work will change anything,” she continued. “But I do think that pointing a camera at something, researching something, writing about something requires a lot of attention. And that attention means that this is important, that this is really important.”