They are very hard to look at, these pictures. Mainly, they come from about the time I was a little boy so I connect with them as a child might — fascinated but frightened, too. They are stark and, in a way that modern murder porn often fails to be, they are real. There is no agenda. They were not meant to be looked at. They were meant to remind and give evidence of something bad that happened and they do that very well.
And then there are the captions — “Detective holds dead woman’s hand to expose cut wrist,” a photograph of a dead woman, still hanging, the rope and her head not visible only the body and the hand.
In “Homicide, 9/13/34, case not available,” the photograph is of an unmade bed, an iron bedstead, a pair of feet, shoes, white socks. The legs trail off, disappearing behind the bed, the person unimportant; only the fact of the feet matters. In these pictures, bodies fall, haphazardly, awkwardly — death doesn’t give them time to arrange themselves like in a movie.
The room is an industrial space, the floor painted a bright red, a large electrical panel protected behind a wire cage. It is a most unlikely place to hang pictures but the room resonates with the images and the images give a different meaning to the room.
In this room, with these pictures, I start to wonder who it is that is next to me. How long they linger in front of a picture becomes important. How closely do they stare? What do they know? I find myself watching everyone a little more closely and I wonder.
Photographs and story by Andy Romanoff – all rights reserved.
