‘My America’ Documents Places Where Lives Were Lost to Lethal Encounters

My America by Diana Matar, a distinguished artist in comparative literature at Barnard College, is a quiet, chilling critique of the United States, an archive of, and a memorial to, those who have died in lethal police encounters in this country. Eight years in the making, the book includes more than 100 black-and-white photographs taken at locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers. The photographs focus on local, mundane settings where the fatalities took place—shopping malls, mobile homes, empty fields, and roadside highways.

Approximately 1,000 people die each year in encounters with police in the U.S., a rate higher than any other industrialized nation. In 2015, Matar began researching the locations where these confrontations were taking place. She made detailed maps in her studio, and eventually compiled information about each lethal police encounter that occurred in 2015 and 2016. Over the next several years, traveling alone on highways, back roads, and city streets, she photographed hundreds of these sites, places that revealed something beyond statistics. In each photo, Matar asks viewers to remember that these are spots where individuals died.

She speaks about the book with Columbia News, along with her current project and the course she’s teaching this semester.

What was the impetus behind this book?

The work in My America on lethal police encounters in the U.S. came after years of research I had previously done on examining how history and power impact individuals and societies. For over a decade, I had been photographing landscapes tied to state-inflicted violence and injustice—in North Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, and especially Libya, where my father-in-law was forcibly disappeared and imprisoned by the Qaddafi regime. I was intimately familiar 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: How that permeates the private lives of generations.

As an artist, I am interested in whether the traces of trauma are perceivable on a landscape. This question underpinned all my work. Might a photograph bear the burden of such history? Against this background, I began thinking about what eventually became My America. In 2015, the year after the unjust deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice by police officers in the U.S.—events that were recorded and widely shared—I felt I wanted to turn my attention to what was happening in my own country. That feeling was not just artistic: It came from the gut, from an unfortunate knowledge of the complex set of consequences that losing someone through extra-judicial means exerts on the family of the one lost. And even though I had been away from the U.S. for 17 years, I deeply cared—and still care—about this country and its people. It matters to me what they do for each other—and to each other—in a way that I can’t possibly feel about anywhere else. When I started the research on what was to become My America, I didn't know what the work would become. All I knew then is that I wanted to ask questions of the land.

How did you select which sites to photograph across the country? 

I began in my studio, researching fatalities in police encounters—who was dying, where, and how—using media reports and citizen organization data, as no national database existed at the time. Then I created maps of each of the 50 states to document this information. Due to the overwhelming numbers and vast geography, I narrowed the focus to victims who died in 2015 and 2016, and in only four states—Texas and California, with the highest total incidents, and New Mexico and Oklahoma, with the highest rates per capita. Then, over the next three and a half years, I took six road trips, and photographed more than 300 sites where citizens had died during police encounters. Only seven of the sites had any type of memorial. Almost all the victims were unknown. Their deaths had not been covered by national media.

My publisher, Stu Smith of Gost Books, and I ultimately selected 110 images for the book. He had the brilliant idea of arranging them chronologically by age of victim. During the editing process, we both came to the same conclusion that the photographs alone couldn’t fully convey the stories. And allowing the land to speak wasn’t enough: The subjects and victims deserved more than the images could provide. So, over the next four years, I investigated the legal outcomes of each case—reviewing district attorney reports, court rulings, and discrepancies between official accounts and family narratives. I tracked all 110 cases using publicly available information through June 2022. Some court cases had not concluded by then, but we decided that would be the cut-off date. The challenge then was to create a book that was both informative and, most of all, respectful to the victims. I didn't want an inflammatory book, but rather a quiet, respectful book, which allowed viewers the space to process the information. All the editing and design decisions emphasized that.  

Are there any victims of police violence whose sites you photographed that particularly resonated with you?

This is a difficult question because so many cases are deeply heartbreaking. And to be honest, I have not been able to forget any of them. Some of the youngest victims were younger than my current students when they died, which is especially hard to comprehend. Nearly a third of the victims were mentally ill, highlighting how a seemingly routine house call can tragically escalate into lethal violence. But two incidents stand out in my memory for different reasons.

One was an encounter where police in Texas were trying to negotiate with two young men—half-brothers, Miguel Martinez and Daniel Dankert—who had stolen a police car. There is a recorded tape of an extremely caring conversation between the brothers and the negotiator. The brothers want to commit suicide, and the negotiator tries to talk them down. Yet the situation escalates, and both young men die.

The other involves Terence Crutcher, a 45-year-old, unarmed African American man who was stranded on the side of the road with a broken-down car in Oklahoma. Crutcher, who was hearing-impaired and blind in one eye, raised his hands in the air when police arrived. The video footage, captured from a police helicopter, is shocking: Crutcher is seen standing calmly with his hands up when the officer fires. Despite the video footage, there was initially a cover-up by the police department, and the officer was not charged. Eventually, the officer was charged and dismissed from the department, only to be hired by another police department in a nearby municipality.

What are you working on now?

I have been working on a photographic/textual project, American Orchard, for the last couple of years. I am trying to capture a portrait of the contemporary American psyche and landscape. While acknowledging the landscape's inherent mystical beauty, I am also focusing on the dereliction of care evident in the breakdown of civic duty, democratic institutions, and questionable land stewardship.  

What are you teaching this semester?

A seminar/studio course, Photographing the Anthropocene: Nature, Environment, and Ecology in Global Photographic Processes. We are looking at how contemporary photographic artists have engaged with nature—in the widest definition of the concept. Each student is working on a semester-long photo essay whose theme is concerned with nature, environment, or ecology.  I have students from many disciplines, which always makes for an interesting class.