The Onlookers
This work is part of a series-in-progress titled The Onlookers. The images come from a
collection of police photographs documenting a vehicular homicide. The grisly subject
matter is central to this type of photograph but closer inspection reveals a more mundane
characteristic of both the crime scene itself and human nature in general; the onlooker.
These images depict their faces - those bystanders who gather along the sidewalks in morbid
curiosity and joined in their collective dread at the unfolding street spectacle. But my goal is
not to inspect the reactions of any particular group of spectators; rather I am interested in
looking at the very act of looking. With this series, as with much of my work I am
attempting to understand something about the whole from these reconstructed
“micrographs”.
Each piece was made from isolated sections of the 8” x 10” glossy police photographs.
Segregated from the whole and greatly enlarged, the faces become barely recognizable as the
image breaks down into its essential elements of silver salts. Yet they are easily readable
from about the same distance one would stand from the scene of an accident.
These images were scanned from gelatin silver prints. The pigmented inkjet enlargements
were then lifted off the substrate with acrylic medium, cut into squares (resembling pixels),
and ultimately reassembled and adhered to sheets of white Plexiglas.
collection of police photographs documenting a vehicular homicide. The grisly subject
matter is central to this type of photograph but closer inspection reveals a more mundane
characteristic of both the crime scene itself and human nature in general; the onlooker.
These images depict their faces - those bystanders who gather along the sidewalks in morbid
curiosity and joined in their collective dread at the unfolding street spectacle. But my goal is
not to inspect the reactions of any particular group of spectators; rather I am interested in
looking at the very act of looking. With this series, as with much of my work I am
attempting to understand something about the whole from these reconstructed
“micrographs”.
Each piece was made from isolated sections of the 8” x 10” glossy police photographs.
Segregated from the whole and greatly enlarged, the faces become barely recognizable as the
image breaks down into its essential elements of silver salts. Yet they are easily readable
from about the same distance one would stand from the scene of an accident.
These images were scanned from gelatin silver prints. The pigmented inkjet enlargements
were then lifted off the substrate with acrylic medium, cut into squares (resembling pixels),
and ultimately reassembled and adhered to sheets of white Plexiglas.
