‘These people matter’: why Diana Matar photographs the sites where US police have killed civilians

The celebrated US photographer’s haunting new series, documenting the locations where people have died in encounters with police, is a quietly devastating commemoration and a critique of modern American culture

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.”

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