In their monochrome starkness, Diana Matar’s images of modern America possess a melancholic undertow that is both familiar and unsettling. Whether a deserted backroad fringed with sun-burnished grass in rural Texas or a single-storey liquor store in a sprawling Californian suburb, there is the sense that these often nondescript places are not where locals tend to linger, never mind gather to mourn and to remember.
And yet the 110 photographs in her new book, My America, are of sites where civilians were killed by law enforcement officers across Texas, California, Oklahoma and New Mexico in 2015 and 2016. “I chose those four states because Texas and California are where most people die in encounters with law enforcement,” she says, “while Oklahoma and New Mexico have the highest per capita deaths. I would have liked to have photographed in other places like Chicago and Georgia, but I simply ran out of money.”
The book’s cumulative impact, though, lies not in the number of images she has made, but in their haunted ordinariness. They evoke an America devoid of the romance of road movies and travelogues, an altogether more mundane landscape of homogenous suburbs, functional civic buildings, concrete churches, motels and apartments. Here and there, the continent’s vastness and elemental beauty is glimpsed, but mostly Matar homes in on the local, often mundane, settings in which many of the fatal encounters took place. Each image is accompanied by the victim’s name, the year of their birth and death, and the location. Towards the end of the book, she includes an explanation of her research methodology and a longer description of the circumstances that led to each killing.
“My work is essentially about memory and violence,” she tells me, “and the question I am constantly trying to answer is, what does the land hold? What can it tell us? I like to think I am able to glean something from the landscapes and locations where terrible violence has occurred, maybe even feel something tangible in these places, but this project definitely challenged that. Again and again, I made images in places where I didn’t feel what happened there in any palpable way.”
What she often found instead was that the mundane nature of the locations overwhelmed everything else. She visited more than 300 sites on her journeys, but only seven had any kind of memorial. “It was as if these places only held meaning for the people closely connected to the victim,” she says. “That there was often no collective acknowledgment may simply reflect our increasingly individualistic American culture or it could be that these kinds of killings have become almost commonplace in some states. Either way, it was unsettling for me. In one sense, the book, as its title suggests, is also about an America that I grew up in and that I was seeing anew.”
Matar was raised in Santa Clara County in California and is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London. She has made several bodies of work around the themes of history, memory and state-sponsored violence, most notably her acclaimed 2014 project, Evidence, for which she travelled to Libya to photograph the sites in which people were assassinated or disappeared by Colonel Gaddafi’s secret police. One of the disappeared was her father-in-law, Jaballa Matar. She was accompanied on the trip by her husband, the writer Hisham Matar, and his mother. In a feature Hisham Matar subsequently wrote for the New Yorker, he noted: “Diana works with great fidelity. Once she gets hold of a thread, she will follow it until the end.” That remains the case.
The images in My America were made after several years of deep research into police killings in America in which she drew on several online databases on the subject, including the Guardian’s long-form investigation, The Counted. She made six trips across the four states, each one lasting around three weeks. Travelling alone by car across often vast distances, she found herself quickly abandoning her usual way or working. “In the past, I’d shoot at dusk when the light was at its most atmospheric, but the distances I had to cover were so daunting, I’d often start photographing at 6am and continue somewhere else at midday, when the light was harshest, because I wanted to reach where I was staying before dark.”
All the photographs in the book were made on an iPhone 6 rather than her usual Hasselblad. “It just suited the subject matter,” she explains, “not least because we really became aware of these killings when they started to be documented on camera phones by people who witnessed them.”
Inevitably, the myriad nondescript sites Matar has documented are foreshadowed by the now infamous police killings that spawned the collective anger and activism of the Black Lives Matter movement. While the names of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ahmaud Armory and Breonna Taylor may well echo through history, the majority of the victims in Matar’s latest book of evidence remain unknown and unmourned except by those closest to them. That perhaps is the saddest subtext of this haunting – and haunted – book of evidence.
In her introduction, Matar asks a question that has preoccupied her throughout her working life: “Can photographs bear the burden of history?” I ask her if making My America has helped her find an answer. After some thought, she says: “I think that societies must bear the burden of history and laws must be enacted in order for that to happen. But photography, or writing, or indeed any creative endeavour that looks closely and deeply at an issue, is an act of acute attentiveness that is essentially saying, this matters.”
She pauses again. “Personally, I don’t have any illusions that this work will change anything, but by doing it I am insisting that what has happened to every one of these people really does really matter. It matters because the past isn’t gone. I know that, not just from my work, but from my own experience. I know what happens when someone is lost to the state. It impacts generations.”
• This article was amended on 28 April 2024 to correct a misspelling of Breonna Taylor’s first name.
• My America is published by GOST Books (£50). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
