Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip, 1973

What are photographs and text doing when they appear together?

The newspaper notices in this book are cold. Death, suicide, disappearance, written in the flattest possible sentences, as if recording weather. But when I turned to the portraits, the words suddenly became warm. Not because the photographs explained the text, but because the person in the photograph became, for a moment, someone who had actually existed.

I kept asking: are these photographs documentary? They knew they were being photographed. They sat there, composed themselves, faced the camera. That moment was arranged. So what exactly was captured?

Perhaps it is the retrospective position that makes it so unbearable. I looked at them alive carrying the knowledge that they were already dead. The restraint in their faces, the stillness, the carefully composed expressions, made me feel what was underneath. Not the grief they expressed. The grief they didn’t. What the notices recorded is only the surface. There were other things, unnamed and unrecorded, that brought them to where they ended up.

Then I thought about Weegee.

In Their First Murder, a man was killed. The photograph records the crowd, the children’s faces, the cross-section of human nature at that instant. The photograph survived. It became iconic. But the man who died, the actual killing that actually happened, has slowly withdrawn from the image.

Text defines photographs. When the text changes, the image becomes something else. When the text disappears, the person disappears with it.

Not forgotten. Erased by the very things that kept them visible.