Death and Beauty in Mexico
Posted by John Brownlee
This picture was taken on Avenida Chapultepec and Calle de Monterrey in Colonia Roma. She was a very famous journalist who wrote some really good books. That day she had a book-release party and was on her way there. She was all made up, going to pick up her sister to go to the event. Crossing the street, two cars crashed and then ran her over. This picture is great because she has all her makeup on and she just doesn’t look dead even though she is.
It is a beautiful and moving photograph, but I’m not sure about that last point: isn’t that a severed lump of mangled, bloody flesh in the right hand corner?
Enrique Metinides [Viceland] : Thanks, Joel
Categories: Photography
Posted at 12:44 pm on July 24, 2007
25 Comments -
This is morbid, in a train wreck sorta way.
Comment by Peregrine — July 24, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
Woops. Must’ve typed “ogrish” instead of “ectomo.” Common mistake, I guess. The keys are like, right next to each other.
Comment by Andrew — July 24, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
Yikes!
You cover up monochrome nipples with censorious cephalopods — but fresh corpse is acceptable viewing?
Comment by Jonathan Harford — July 24, 2007 @ 1:49 pm
Great photo, amzaing and touching and beautiful in an admittedly morbid way. “Der schöne Tod”.
Comment by kid37 — July 24, 2007 @ 1:55 pm
This isn’t posted to be grotesque. It’s posted because it is a beautiful, moving and tragic photograph. As the poster notes, she doesn’t even look dead, and it isn’t particularly gory.
Look, I’m not posting this to be morbid. I’m posting it because — like photographs from World War I of the trenches or some of the heartbreaking photos from Iraq — there is sometimes extraordinary beauty in the photographic composition of horror.
As for the censoring angle: we censor stuff to keep the site work safe. We’re trying to conform the hypocrisy of NSFW reasoning in corporate america, which says, across the board, that nudity is more questionable than death. Like it or not (and we don’t, because we find nothing to be ashamed of in looking at a naked body), our traffic is all during 9-5 work hours, and that means we need to be considerate.
But back to the photo: this isn’t an eviscerated, pulsing, bleeding corpse, photographed with callous insensitivity. It’s a beautifully composed photograph that tragically moves us. And that’s the kind of thing we want to post on Ectomo when we come across it.
Comment by John Brownlee — July 24, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
I want you to post it on Ectomo, too!
I just want to brace myself before I see it.
Comment by Jonathan Harford — July 24, 2007 @ 2:36 pm
It’s your blog, post whatever the hell you want. But I don’t think the reaction is entirely unexpected. We, meaning society in general, have come to expect the majority of deceased to be treated with a certain amount of dignity.
Post the twisted corpse of an accident victim, and you tear down certain barriers of comfort that people have between them and their own mortality. Maybe that was your intent. I don’t know.
But you’re going to get a reaction. Maybe it was more or less the reaction you were looking for, maybe not. But there it is.
Comment by Peregrine — July 24, 2007 @ 2:50 pm
Well, it’s our blog, but we write it for you guys. If we lose your trust because of it, it’s an issue for us.
I suppose I must have been wrong on this one: I do not find the image intensely unpleasant or uncomfortable, and posted things on ToM (like the fire escape falling down with the children in the air) that I was a lot more uncomfortable with… although, in that case, I didn’t know the full story.
Seriously, if I upset anyone, I’m sorry. But I find the tragic beauty of this picture far more remarkable than uncomfortable. It was not an attempt to shock.
Comment by John Brownlee — July 24, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
[...] Enrique Metinides is our new favorite photographer [Viceland.com, via Ectoplasmosis] [...]
Pingback by frankie23.com | viva la rudo » Blog Archive » Look both ways before you cross the street — July 24, 2007 @ 3:05 pm
The fire escape was a B&W photo that was 30 years old. And they were technically still alive in the air. A petty distinction, I know, but…
I was a little surprised about it too, but at first we didn’t know the circumstances. behind it. It was a commenter who pointed out that it was real, and that someone actually died an instant after it was taken.
This is a little closer to home. A little more contemporary. I don’t object. But I also understand the reaction to it. I’ve seen worse, whether I wanted to or not. Snopes has a video of a guy blowing his head off in police custody.
I’m not going to worry to much about it. It’ll drift off the bottom of the page sooner or later. I’ll let the others weigh in, and leave it to you to figure out.
Comment by Peregrine — July 24, 2007 @ 3:06 pm
Please don’t be hesitant your stance on posting this John.
This photograph is art. It’s not meant to be disrespectful in any way and is not overtly graphic.
And anyway, only Jonathan (and maybe Andrew?) objected. That’s not that many people.
Comment by Pierre — July 24, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
Oh and by the way I absolutely love the photograph. How pale she is in contrast to the people around her stare upwards is wondrous.
The severed bloody flesh tethering her clothing to the pole does bring your mind back to the grotesqueness of it all.
Comment by Pierre — July 24, 2007 @ 3:58 pm
As you say, its not that it’s ‘disgusting’ as much as ‘disturbing’ though has anyone figured out what that is in the right-hand corner? The not knowing actually disturbs me more … Which given this sites love of H.P. Lovecraft kind of suits but…
Comment by John Mortell — July 24, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
[...] ‘Ectomo.com’ one of those photos that makes you stop for a minute or several… take a [...]
Pingback by John Mortell’s blog » Death in Mexico — July 24, 2007 @ 4:03 pm
It kinda looks like her purse or handbag. There’s what appears to be a strap heading up towards her shoulder.
Comment by Peregrine — July 24, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
I’ve been coming back to this photograph again and again. I mean, it’s an eerily beautiful photograph but I’ll admit, mostly I’ve been trying to figure out what is going on in the lower right. Looking at it now, I wonder if Peregrine is right and the subject matter has tricked us into misinterpreting a clothing accessory.
Comment by Ross R. — July 24, 2007 @ 4:12 pm
Can’t say I was thinking it ‘definitely something bad’ and I think you are probably right Peregrine but for me, when I couldn’t figure out what it was my mind assumed the worst…
Comment by John Mortell — July 24, 2007 @ 6:10 pm
Godammit, so everybody take a lesson from this photo and start driving more carefully.
Comment by Mogo the Mugger — July 24, 2007 @ 6:50 pm
This is an amazing photo. Such content usually falls into Psychical Distance where some (or perhaps many) viewers will simply be under or over distanced from the piece. I would maintain that “comfortable” art is less preferable to that art which makes us uncomfortable.
Comment by Xrys — July 24, 2007 @ 10:34 pm
I’m glad to have seen it, yet feel she deserves better.
The problem with this photo is that it is extremely powerful and profound. And it is a mouse flick away from “Decomposed Hot Dog” and “Japanese Schoolgirl Panties.”
Comment by Darren — July 25, 2007 @ 1:55 am
It’s my pinion you were quite right in posting that photograph. Death is ambivalent regarding whom it takes, or when. At least the deceased appears to have been calm when death came. I hope, when it come for me, I’ll not be in agony; but one never knows….
Comment by Joseph A. Haran, Jr. — July 25, 2007 @ 3:55 am
“The problem with this photo is that it is extremely powerful and profound. And it is a mouse flick away from “Decomposed Hot Dog” and “Japanese Schoolgirl Panties.””
We can’t dedicate the front page to long-faced mourning every time we decide to post something sad. We post stuff that interests us as we find it.
Comment by John Brownlee — July 25, 2007 @ 4:05 am
This makes me think of a collaboration between Weegee & Jeff Wall.
It’s gruesomely exquisite.
Comment by muse x — July 25, 2007 @ 2:47 pm
“I just want to brace myself before I see it.”
Bingo. A little fair warning is all that I ask. It’s like goatse: If you’re not expecting it, it’s gross as hell, but when you’re the one planning to goatse someone, the image isn’t all that horrible to deal with.
I’m sure that made sense at some point before I tried to put it into words, but yeah. Fair warning was what I was going for, I think.
Comment by Andrew — July 26, 2007 @ 3:04 am
This photo is called “Adela Legeratta Rivas, struck by a Datsun, 1979″
I love this photo, shame it’s a bit washed out here. I have a copy that is much clearer and her eyes are looking upwards as if she is still alive. It was recently published in Vice magazine in Belgium in an article by Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides and featured in the Guardian.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,,1048129,00.html
Comment by Adam Hughes — August 12, 2007 @ 9:41 am