After presenting the recipients of the 2017 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in Humanistic Photography awards on October 18, 2017 (Daniel Garcia Castro, Edmund Clark and Alex Majoli), The Eye of Photography joins the organization and features the works of the prize finalists.
With over 300 unsolved murders in the last two decades, Chester, PA, is known as a place where you can get away with murder. For the last 6 years, I’ve collaborated with community members in attempt to understand the physical and psychological implications of this popular perception.
The photographic representation is a series of triptychs showcasing particular families struggle for justice. Each one contains an illustration made from a piece of ephemeral material from the family, along with a family portrait, and an image from the murder scene captured around the time of day the crime was committed. Imperatively, to give the families’ a vehicle in their own depiction, I’ve collected ephemeral material (letters, love songs, drawings, diary entries and other objects), which is interwoven into the presentation.
Chester is not a place where you can get away with murder. This graphic novella will serve as an archeological index for investigating, [dis]assembling, and [re]framing each murder as a living memory that simultaneously traverses and molds the landscape, psyche, and soma of Chester.
The purpose of this work is to forge pathways towards justice, disassembling, and re- framing each murder as living memory that simultaneously traverses and molds the landscape, psyche, and soma of Chester.
Justin Maxon
Justin Maxon (1983) was born in a small town in the woods of northern California. An artist and documentarian, he is committed to working on projects that reveal different variables of truth in humanities conflicted existence, and incorporate various artistic forms and expressions.
