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My America by Diana Matar.
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Diana Matar
GOST Books, London, UK, 2024. 304 pp., 110 images, 8x10".
How did it come to be that so many citizens in the United States distrust the keepers of public order? Diana Matar’s photobook My America, about police brutality in the United States, doesn’t explain why this problem has persisted to the point of becoming representative of its society, nor does it attempt to disentangle its systemic nature. This is a painful subject to broach, so instead of showing the violent acts that enrage and leave us feeling powerless, it gathers facts that condemn the police’s betrayal of confidence against the very people it’s supposed to protect. Not every victim included here was innocent, but Matar’s examination makes it clear that the concepts of law and justice are too often on divergent paths, with the police working as sovereign executioners facing little consequences for their actions.
The countless cases of police brutality captured on camera — whether by citizen journalists, security, home, or body cameras — prove that what’s upsetting to watch in fiction, think of the pivotal scene in the film Widows that’s the source of the protagonists’ trauma, can be barely tolerable to watch when it actually happened. The problem is that these images take a toll on us, and if we look away when they have worn us down, we might stop meditating on the reasons why this violence is allowed to exist. Yet, as important as this subject is, it’s undeniably a challenge to make work about topics so overwhelmingly unambiguous, a conundrum Matar has previously experienced. Her first book Evidence, about her father-in-law’s forced disappearance in Libya, also investigated how ordinary landscapes intersect with state-sponsored violence. In this sense, My America continues Matar’s attempt to understand the emotional repercussions that these incidents can have on our perception of the landscape.
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The book has a minimalist design, as if Matar wanted to avoid any expressive elements colliding with its somber topic. An introductory statement by the artist is followed by a transcript of an incident in which police officers shoot a person suffering from the aftereffects of his medication. Then, a section explaining the project’s genesis closes this long (and uncommon) textual prelude to the photographs. We encounter an equally sparse layout in the book’s main section. The right page registers the victim’s name, the years of their birth and death, and the city where the incident happened. The facing page features a picture of that place. These conceptual diptychs constitute the bulk of the book. When, despite her best efforts, Matar couldn’t locate the spot in question, she photographed the sky instead. The flow of pictures is interrupted in the middle by a section on statistics relating to mental health, accountability, gun ownership, and other pertinent categories. These text pages are printed on a different stock than the photographs, which adds to the material complexity of the publication.
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Matar used an iPhone for practical reasons rather than her usual medium-format camera. This decision allowed her to operate quickly, but it also ties the images to the production, distribution, and consumption dynamics of citizen journalism. Her methodology, which deserves its own section at the end of the book, was to constrain the project to California, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The former are the states in which most people died as a result of police brutality during the period covered by the book, while the latter are the states with the highest number of deaths per capita. Matar was interested in finding out whether these events had left a trace in the landscape and was shocked to discover that only seven out of the roughly three hundred sites she photographed had any kind of memorial, with the remaining ones bearing no evidence of the violent acts that happened there. Matar claims that she wasn’t pursuing the precision demanded of forensic photographers, although she did want to capture the place where the body had rested since what is present in the frames relates to the implications of what we can understand, read, or decode from the landscape (an exercise in subjective looking implied in the title).
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Each case is described in more detail at the end of the book, and the publication date was pushed back because of the implications of the text’s terminology. For instance, the term “fatal interaction” had to be used to avoid legal troubles, which shows how jargon is used by the offending party to soften the harshness of this social problem and muddle their accountability. In this sense, including this long textual section is vital to the book’s intent, with many of these accounts underscoring a corruption the American government has never owned up to. In a particularly egregious case, a woman suffering from mental health issues threatens an officer with a log, for which she gets fatally tasered. However, the Custodial Death Report states she died from a drug overdose. The repetitive lack of justice in the stories suggests that if you are poor or have a mental health condition, the chances of getting shot by the police during a confrontation are very high.
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My America is a timely indictment of a sociopolitical malaise that has affected the US for too long, but the author’s good intentions don’t mean the book is beyond criticism. While the statistics and texts turn it into a politically committed artwork, they also render it somewhat dry. This textual framework is congruent with Matar’s activist past, but readers must decide if this information is too didactic. Reading cases of police brutality back-to-back can also be emotionally draining, even demoralizing. As such, the responsibility of the book’s subtlety and depth are left to the images because of their implicit indeterminacy, with the interpretive possibilities lying in those aspects they contain but cannot state explicitly. Photographs, unlike words, cannot be reduced to a discourse of social justice, so what these pictures say collectively is less clear. Their raison d’etre is indivisible from the texts that accompany them, and yet, since the landscape of murder is indistinguishable from the landscape of everyday life, photographs contain the possibility of affecting us in different and unplanned ways.
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In other words, the book’s emotional core derives from reading, not looking. Matar claims she didn’t place the texts alongside the photographs, like in Sternfeld’s On this Site, because she wanted to create a memorial to the victims so that they weren’t defined by how they died. The result is a hermetic visual structure that could have benefited from a wider variety of textual and visual elements that made its proposition more ambiguous. As it stands, indignation and grief seem like the only fitting reactions. Engineering such a calibrated response is characteristic of melodrama, which tends to elicit a narrow spectrum of emotions due to the equally narrow display of sentiments in its narrative construction. This book is not melodramatic per se, but the key to having a more aesthetically ambiguous experience lies in spending time with the pictures, which are less prescriptive. In her statement, Matar questions whether landscapes can “hold memory.” Anyone who has visited their childhood home or primary school will likely share an answer, but we can expect photographs to do even more, which is, in the end, what Matar was after in this captivating book.
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