In these times of the Paris Fashion Week, we were looking in photobooks for stories of pretty girls running their hands through their hair. No luck.
Let’s take advantage of the opportunity to make amends for an oversight, a masterpiece ignored by the Journal de la Photographie. October 2011 saw the release of Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood, with a preface by Luc Sante. In this essay, Patterson retraces the bloody tale of Charles Starkweather, 19, and Caril Ann Fugate, 14, who at the end of the 1950s killed a dozen people they encountered, including Fugate’s family, on their journey from Nebraska to Wyoming, where they were captured.
Patterson isn’t the first to take inspiration from their story. Terrence Malick’s used it as the basis for his first (and best) film, Badlands (1973), as did Bruce Springsteen for the album Nebraska, and Oliver Stone. Patterson takes a different approach of the episode. By combining illustration, reporting, crime scene and landscape imagery, he produces a unique tale, drawing out the subject’s novelistic core and using it to fill his pictures and facsimiles of letters typed out by the young killers.
One cannot help but imagine Caril Ann Fugate, once seduced at 14 by a lover who thought he was James Dean, coming today upon Redheaded Peckerwood in the small Michigan town where she lived. How close are Patterson’s image to those that remain in her head?
Antoine Soubrier
Redheaded Peckerwood
Mack Books Editions
164 pages
19 x 24 cm
45 €
