As a preamble to their performances, traditional storytellers in Majorca would say, “It was and it was not so.” David Shields, Reality Hunger

I guess I started to think about the reconstructed photograph when I first saw Sally Mann’s lovely yet disturbing photographs of her children in the now classic book, Immediate Family. She unabashedly revealed she sometimes staged events in her children’s lives after they happened, and what caught my attention was not the strategy so much as the reconstruction in no way lessened the psychological truth of the event; in fact, if anything, it heightened it.

This was in 90s when it was becoming obvious that a photograph’s veracity is as much concerned with psychological truth as it is with the literal description of a present moment; that every photograph almost without exception contains multiple and sometimes conflicting, even contradictory meanings, and shades of meaning, particularly once divorced from written explanation. Sally Mann’s family pictures were among the harbingers of this attitudinal shift which was later accelerated by the advent of digital photography with its chameleon-like ability to effortlessly change meaning with often only a tangential relationship with what actually has transpired in front of the lens.

 








 

 

 

 

Sally Mann, the Fall


The reconstructed event is fairly commonplace in the history of photography as some of the 20th century’s most iconic images were re-enacted for the camera ranging from the flag raising at Iowa Jima to the  ( it is suspected) Robert Capa’s falling soldier of the Spanish Civil War. Modern art photographs are often reconstructions too, although sometimes the event reconstructed only existed to be photographed, as in the work of Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall.

 












Gregory Crewdson

Crime reconstructions are commonplace in the world of forensic photography with one crucial difference; there is no pretense in forensic crime reconstructions that the event referred to is the reality. The past event has been replaced by a theatrical shadow event. The participants, like actors going through a first read-through, make it obvious that tragedy has been replaced by bureaucracy. The actors, often office workers hastily recruited to stand in for murderers, crime victims and suicides, stand about with their props – knives, guns, clubs – and with  glazed eyes make it obvious they are performing a task no more exciting than any other during their work day. Somehow this tension between the original event charged with terror and shock and its banal recreation as an office routine make the images all the more fascinating.

 

Bill Wood: where the hit-and-run occurred

 

 

What spurred these reflections is an interesting book which came out in 2007, The Shock of Modernity: Crime photography in Mexico City by filmmaker Jesse Lerner. The book mostly features the work of the Casasola brothers, Agustín and Miguel, who operated a commercial photography business in Mexico City in the decades before World War Two. The resulting collection is simply known as the Casasola archive and is housed in the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. Like Weegee in New York and other Mexican photographers such as Enrique Metidines, the Casasola brothers specialized in crime photography, a sub-genre of which were reconstructed crimes.

 

Casasola archive: crime reconstruction

 

 

Casasola archive: crime reconstruction

 

Although artists, many of them famous, recalled crime scenes in sketches based on witnesses’ memory such as this woodcut by the Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, which depicts the murder of a child ( curiously, the child looks more like a miniature adult.)

 

 

Generally, photography was preferred for crime scene reconstructions and the Casasola brothers were eager to oblige.

 

Casasola archive: crime reconstruction

 

 

In 1929, one of the Casasola brothers ( Casasola photographers were generally not credited) photographed Tina Modotti recreating the assassination of her lover Julio Mella.

 

Casasola Archives: Tina Modotti re-enacting the assassination of Julio Mella

 

Wikipedia: “On January 10, 1929, Modotti’s comrade and companion Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated, ostensibly by agents of the Cuban government. … Modotti — who was a target of both the Mexican and Italian political police— was questioned about [the] crime amidst a concerted anti-communist, anti-immigrant press campaign, that depicted “the fierce and bloody Tina Modotti” as the perpetrator…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tina Modotti by Edward Weston

 

Reconstructing the dramatic events in the life of Tina Modotti, actress, photographer, a model for Diego Rivera, and Edward Weston (a lover of both),and later a revolutionary in the Spanish Civil War would seem a natural for a novelist or a filmmaker. To date, as far as I know, none have been tempted although she has attracted a number of biographers and there are several books of her photography on the market.

 
















The Unmade Bed, 1957 by Imogen Cunningham.©  1957, 2011 The Imogen Cunningham Trust

 

Tina Modotti, The Puppeteer’s Hands

 

As a somewhat grisly postscript there are companies which supply props to those reconstructing crimes. From forensicbody.com you can purchase plaster heads filled with blood-like substances which gives you the opportunity to experiment with blood splatter ( a hot subject since the advent of Showtime’s program Dexter) and the same company can even supply faux corpses in any stage of decay you desire.

 

Dual shot spatterhead

 

Row of bodies: 9 Females, 1 Male. Fresh bodies with no trauma, except one has a rash on her leg.

 

UPDATE:

May 13, 2011: The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi reports that the White House was caught  re-enacting the President’s speeches and other events for the camera after the events were over. Captions accompanying the re-enacted photographs  made it seem like the event was photographed in real time.

A embarrassed White House spokesman said such re-enactments, if necessary,  would have a caption identifying them as such.