My America — Diana Matar. Published by GOST Books.
Matar’s ten-year project researching cases and photographing sites of lethal encounters with law enforcement in 2015 and 2016 is presented in a direct and information-rich book called My America. Black-and-white photographs of non-descript locations are paired with a victim’s name, life dates, and location of death. The sheer number of them, each the heartbreaking representation of a life cut short, offers granularity to a topic often reduced to politicized arguments.
Matar complements the photographs with data: a police encounter transcript in which a citizen died; a mid-book assembly of facts about casualties, mental health, race, training, accountability, and civilian gun ownership; and appendices that detail the legal outcome of the cases she documented, statistics of lethal encounters with US police, and a list of 2015’s victims. The resulting book thoroughly addresses the police violence epidemic that has become more visible since Matar began her work over a decade ago.
Dr. Rebecca Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. She has curated fifty exhibitions, including her recent Richard Avedon: Relationships, which was shown in Milan and Palermo, Italy, and Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, and has contributed chapters, interviews, and essays to over a dozen publications.
In 2021, based on her successful proposal, the Center for Creative Photography was awarded a significant grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to produce a book and exhibition celebrating the Chicano photographer Louis Carlos Bernal. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and in 2020 released a book on Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, co-published by the CCP and Yale University Press, now in a second printing.
RebeccaSenf.com
Instagram: @beckysenfccp