My America
Diana Matar
Diana Matar (born 1962) is an American photographer living in London. Her photobook My America is about police brutality in the United States. In the US approximately 1000 people die each year in encouters with police. More than in any other industrialised nation. My America is a memorial to the victims of these encounters.
In My America Diana Matar documents the locations where people have died in encouters with the police. The book has a minimalist design. An introductory statement by the artist is followed by a transcript of an incident in which police officers shoot a person suffering from the aftereffects of his medication. Then follows a section explaining the project’s genesis.
The book consists of 110 photographs made in 2015 and 2016 of sites across Texas, California, Oklahoma and New Mexico in 2015 and 2016. The section with photographs is also sparse. The right page gives the victim’s name, the years of their birth and death, and the city where the incident happened. The facing page features a picture of that place. When Matar couldn’t find the spot in question, she photographed the sky instead.
In the middle of the book is a section on statistics relating to mental health, gun ownership, and other categories. Towards the end of the book she includes a longer description of the circumstances that led to each killing. In this section Matar describes each case in more detail.
Matar was interested in finding out whether these events had left a trace in the landscape. But the ground did not seem to remember. And neither did we. What upset her the most was to find out that only seven of the sites she visited had any kind of memorial.
All pictures were made using a IPhone. It ties the images to the production and consumption dynamics of citizen journalism. But while the names of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and George Floyd are known, the majority of the victims in Matar’s book remain unknown and unmourned except by those closest to them.
My America
Photographer: Diana Matar
Publisher: GOST Books
Published in 2024
Hardback, 304 pages, 110 images, 19,5 x 25,4 cm
Shortlisted for the 2024 Photo-Text Book Award at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie Festival in Arles