D i a n a
M a t a r

MY AMERICA

Robert Adams writes on the first page of that seminal book on photography, Why People Photograph, ‘…There is still time—in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.’

I have come back to this line so many times as I travel across these western states—it is written in my diary and I read it again and again—drawing from its wisdom and wondering if in fact I am on the right path.

Each morning I rise early in a motel room and implicate myself into an hour of exercise and meditation —something I am not as disciplined about at home. I seem to need the physical and psychic strength to produce this work. I make my way down the outside stairs or elevator to the motel cafe. The breakfast rooms have entered my dreams. Across the miles, the details of each meld into the next. Bright garish colours on the carpet and chairs; the smell of waffles and American drip coffee; families having come together across the vast continent for a wedding, a reunion, or to view a university with a child about to leave home. Reserve military officers on annual training; businessmen and women in blue suits; retired couples sitting silently across from one another. Occasionally there is a couple so obviously in love. Almost always—even in the humblest of motels—there is a large television. Depending on the region, the morning news broadcast by—Fox TV or CNN or MSNBC—is muted to silent but its glow of light illuminates the breakfast room, ensuring everyone is sharing in something even if they do not agree with what is being said.  People speak easily with each other while waiting in line for their waffles, boxed cereal and scrambled eggs and don’t hesitate entering into conversation with people sitting at a nearby table. I wonder if they are lonely, but over the three years I have been photographing in America, I have come to the conclusion that they feel part of one extended tribe. I feel alien to this and yet possess a strange comfort in it as well. I gather up my things, pack them in the trunk and am on the road. ‘…There is still time—in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.’

I left America in my thirties, already an adult, and have come back to photograph seventeen years later. I drive back roads and highways, suburbs and urban centres. Robert Adams writes about the light and it is true, on these vast roads and elongated spaces it feels like there will always be time to catch it. But I am rushing from one place to another. I am  not photographing randomly, although I wish I were. Each place I document corresponds to a coordinate where someone has died in an encounter with a law enforcement officer. 

Last year in the United States, 1,093 people died in lethal police encounters. 

After being away for so long, I have internalised a European sense of America—the fear of its violence, the exoticness of its haphazard  buildings and grid like streets. The vast landscape and the random spaces between things are captivating. I am surprised by this, but more surprised by how well I know these people, this land and this architecture, in a way I didn’t even know I knew. I care about the country and the people. It matters to me what they do for each other—and to each other—in a way that I can’t possibly feel anywhere else. I am part of the tribe.

I finished photographing in Tulsa yesterday and boarded a plane. Just hours after I left police shot another man. 

One in 4 people who die in an encounter with a law enforcement officer in the US is living with a severe (clinical) mental health condition.

From 1950 to the present day the number of psychiatric beds available in the US for in-patient care, has fallen by 90%.

Between 10% and 20% of calls made to law enforcement agencies in the US involve a mental health issue. This is due in part to decades of cuts in mental health services and facilities.

In many cases involving those living with a mental health
condition, it is a family member who calls the police for help.
But due to a respondent’s lack of specialised mental health
training, the call can result in the person’s death. 

The risk of dying during an encounter with the police is 16

times higher for individuals living with an untreated severe mental health condition than it is for other civilians.

Approximately 1 in 7 law enforcement officers in the US
has received specialised mental health training.

 
There is a demand by departments across numerous law enforcement
agencies in the US for specialised mental health training.

Training for officers continues to be waitlisted.

Per capita, Indigenous People in the US are more likely to die in encounters with law enforcement than people of other races or ethnicities.

Indigenous females are 38 times as likely to die from an encounter with law enforcement than are white females.

Black males aged 15-34 are 9 times more likely to to die in an encounter with law enforcement officers than other American males and 5 times more likely than white men in the same age range.

Black American men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to die in an officer involved death during their lifetime.

Roughly one in 65 deaths of Black males in the US is at the hands of the police.

Black Americans who have died in a police encounter are twice as likely to be unarmed as white Americans.

In the US the racial identity of people who die in encounters
with law enforcement is affected by geography. For example,
in the two calendar years of 2015 and 2016, in California, 41%
of citizens who died in encounters with law enforcement officers were Hispanic. People of Hispanic ethnicity made up 39% of California’s population.In Chicago 90% of those who died in encounters with law enforcement were Black. Black Americans made up 29% of Chicago’s population. In Arizona 12.5% of those who died in encounters with law enforcement were Indigenous People. Indigenous People made up 5.3% of Arizona’s population. 

Nationwide, 52% of those who died in encounters with law enforcement were white, while 61% of the population was white. 

Nationwide, 25.6% of people who died in encounters law enforcement were Black, while Black Americans made up 13% of the nation’s population.

Military veterans and active-duty service members of all races die in encounters with police at a rate 1.4 times greater than civilians.

In the US, dying in an encounter with law enforcement is the

sixth leading cause of death for men aged 25–29, regardless
of race.

The US has one of the lowest police training requirements
of any country in the world.

On average, police officers in the US receive less than six months of basic training.

In the US, there are approximately 18,000 separate police
agencies and no national standards for use-of-force training.

Fifty-eight percent of people who die in encounters with
police are armed with guns. Experts believe the lives of
the remaining 42% could be saved by using de-escalation
techniques.

De-escalation uses non-violent strategies to decrease the intensity of a situation. Training in these methods has been shown to improve communication between an officer and members of the public, reduce the need for force and reduce lethal police encounters.

One of the few definitive studies in Louisville, Kentucky showed 28% fewer use-of-force incidents, 26% fewer injuries to citizens and 36% fewer injuries to officers in the year after its officers received eight hours of de-escalation training.

Almost half—48%—of local police departments have fewer
than ten full-time officers.

Officers working in small, rural and tribal departments often are lone responders and cannot rely on backup. Such departments are less likely than urban departments to train officers in new tactics such as de-escalation because it takes
officers off the streets and requires additional funding.

Between 2013 and 2019 the number of people who died
in encounters with law enforcement in urban areas declined by 27%. During the same period the number of people who
died in encounters with law enforcement in rural areas
increased by 34%

In the US, the chances of an officer being convicted of murder
after a citizen has died in a lethal encounter is about 1 in 2,000.

Experts believe that the ambiguity of what constitutes legal and illegal use-of-force by an officer is partly to blame for the lack of police accountability in lethal police actions.

There is no universally agreed upon definition of what
constitutes use-of-force by a police officer. The International
Association of Chiefs of Police defines it as ‘the amount
of effort required by police to compel compliance by an
unwilling subject.’ 

The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution allows police officers to use force that is ‘objectively reasonable’ if a suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officer[s] or to others.This has been interpreted by the US Supreme Court to include instances when an officer has reasonable fear of injury or death. 

This definition has made it difficult for juries to convict law enforcement officers of excessive force, manslaughter and murder.

It also means prosecutors are less willing to bring charges
against officers. In addition, for evidence, public prosecutors
often rely on information from police departments whose
officer they are prosecuting.

There is no official federally coordinated count of how many officers have been prosecuted, tried and convicted after a citizen has died in an officer involved death. 

Major news organisations use a study conducted at Bowling
Green State University in Ohio, by ex-police officer Philip Stinson, who has complied data since 2005 to determine officer prosecution rates. Since the study began it has
identified 155 cases of officers being charged with murder
or manslaughter in connection with on-duty activities.

At the time of this writing about one third of those have been convicted of some crime. Seven have been convicted of murder.

In 2019, California voters passed a law that changed the wording of its use-of-force standard to: police can use deadly force, ‘only when necessary in defense of human life.’

There are 333 million people living in the US.

There are 393 million guns privately owned by civilians
in the US.

US citizens make up 4.18% of the world’s population.

US citizens possess 46% of the world’s civilian-owned guns.

Between 1980 and 2018, 13.2% of all global deaths committed
by law enforcement officers occurred in the US. 2018 was the last year statistics were compiled.

Can photographs bear the burden of history? It is the central question I have been asking in my work for years. I am not unfamiliar with how violence enacted by officers of the state—the very people entrusted to care for our safety—can affect an individual, a family and a society. Perhaps, it is why I have asked of photography something I am not confident it can deliver. Every time I point my camera towards a landscape where an act of injustice has occurred, I am asking the land what it knows. And I think there is value in doing so even if the answer is left in doubt. If, as I believe, to photograph is a desire to know something deeply and beyond the surface, I must be quiet to see. Attending to something says I acknowledge it matters.

Does violence leave a trace on the topography where the violence occurred? My instinct says yes. Can a picture tell us anything about what really matters—about what happened before the photographer arrived? Of that, I am not sure. What I do believe, however, is that even if a photograph cannot communicate the past, there is value in documenting the ground where violence has taken place. Possibly a photograph can offer ways to remember acts of violence and injustice that have been forgotten or never made transparent. Perhaps, as Emmet Gowin wrote: ‘This is the thing about a landscape photograph, it gives the heart a place to stand.’

Approximately 1000 people die each year in lethal police encounters in the United States. I photographed at over three hundred sites where these encounters lethal encounters took place. 

My America is published  by GOST BOOKS.