Hi I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching
AdoramaTV. I'm here the photo London
event central London at the stunning
Somerset House. It's an event that brings
book publishers, photographers
and galleries together to chat about all
things photography and for us that means
we get the chance to talk to some of the
participants. My guest today is the
American photographer Diana Matar. Diana is
widely exhibited work in the UK, Ireland
Singapore, Germany and the United States.
She's also a recipient of a number
of awards and grants.
Well Diana welcome to the show. It's
really great to have you here. Thank you.
I'm really pleased to be talking to you Doug.
So I've been looking at some of your
work online really intrigued by a lot of it.
I think it's very emotional. I really
really loved the stuff from Libya,
partially because I've got a little bit
of a personal interest in it as I've
been to Libya myself a couple times,
although before the Arab Spring. Can you
tell us a little bit how that work came about?
Yes. My father-in-law is a Libyan dissident
and was kidnapped in the early 90's
and imprisoned and I started making that
work looking at spaces where people had
been disappeared by the Libyan regime
both inside and outside of Libya.
I couldn't go to the Libya until after
Gaddafi was was killed but when he was
killed and I went back with my husband's
family and started photographing all
kinds of spaces where people who had
been interned and disappeared and
tortured and kind of these sites of
violence and it was obviously of a
very personal project, a very emotional
project and then widened into more
of a look at the country itself, not just
my own family.
So as a photographer and I
know this intimately myself it's a very
emotional form and so doing something
like that in Libya it must have brought
up a lot of emotions.
How how did you, sort of deal
with being in the country in such a
trauma?
Actually for me going to
Libya was amazing and on the contrary
it was, I didn't find it traumatic. It was the,
my husband's family had been basically
exiled from the country for many, many
years, so everything I knew about Libya
before was very negative. It's a place
that they had to leave. It's the
place my father-in-law was was
imprisoned and disappeared, not seen
again, so going there
meant that the regime had changed.
It meant I could meet the rest of the
family. It was a very joyful time
actually, personally and the time that I
was there which is in 2012 was a time
of great possibility. It hadn't descended
into the place that it has now obviously
it was going through a lot of very
remarkable things that countries go
through when it when a dictatorship has
fallen. Obviously things have changed
since then but at that time it was a
very, very moving ,
it was the possibilities of a robust
civil society were just taking place so
it was a very exciting place to be.
So we were chatting earlier
before we got on camera
and you were telling me that the
your experience in Libya
has directly led to your next piece of work.
Can you explained a little bit of whats coming up?
So in 2015
1146 people were killed by police in America.
I said I was just flabbergasted
by this number and because I am interested
in spaces of violence,
I thought I'd look into that
and into the places where these things
happened and I started doing a lot of
research. I used three different
databases. One from the Washington Post.
Another which is a community-based
database and then the Guardian
in the UK also started creating a database
where they posted daily each person that
was killed by police in America and they
crucially put the address or a close
address to where this happened, which
kind of allowed me away in. So I started
looking at these statistics
and I started mapping them all out
using these three databases
and I found that although the statistics change daily
a majority or almost 50% of the killings
in each year seem to take place in these
six western states, so I thought I would
start at these areas and that's what
I've done so I'll Drive sometimes eight
or ten hours, place to place and going to
these spots and photographing these
sites where these killings have happened
and I'm not approaching it as they're
not crime photos.
They're not,
they are locations,
so I have a location and I go
and I photographed there.
So with this new work
you're bringing out, how do you
expect or what you want the viewer to react?
How do you want to be ready react to your work?
It's such an interesting question
because it's a very loaded subject
and I think what I'm trying to do
is take down the heat a bit.
I want the photographs to act as kind of
meditative spaces not to overlook the
violence, not to subdue the violence,
but allow a place that people can engage
with the numbers of what's happening
it's not an indictment on the police
we all need police. We are grateful that
the police exist but it is an indictment
I think on the kind of society that can
allow this to happen that so many people can
be killed by police. It is a country
that is armed you know so there are
going to be more violent incidents
between the police and the public than
maybe in a in a country that is unarmed.
What I plan to do in the work is show
the work and I'm doing a book as well
and the images will be up on the wall
and they won't have stories with them.
They won't have names with them. They
won't have race with them but I will be
doing some kind of pamphlet
that people walk around with,
that they will get all that information
and the reasoning for that is I want the
images to kind of speak on their own for
just the overwhelming number of these
things happening and then people can
look and look at some of the statistics
and the statistics say a lot.
For this bodywork, this massive body of work
you've switched over to the dark side,
into digital digital world.
How're you finding that?
I probably won't do it again
but I'm finding it incredibly liberating.
I mean as I said I go from, you know
spending two to three hours setting up
and shooting a photograph to arriving
and just shooting very quickly and
responding to whatever light is there so
yeah it's liberating.
How important are events like like photo
London to your kind of work?
Oh really that's really important. I think on so
many levels actually, I mean first of all you know
I'm shown in a gallery, my gallery shows my
work here. It's a very important outlet
for work, if people see it. So for
the health of the industry for
photographs being out in the market, it's
very important but for me personally and
I think for many people working in
photography and as both editorial
photographers, artists, journalists
all kinds of clubs it's a gathering
place and I think this several around
the world. There is Paris Photo of course
there's a festival in Houston and there
are many others but these these
festivals and these fairs,
they're a place where you meet your
colleagues, you know, I'll see people here
that I haven't seen for two years since
I last went to Houston or since I was at
Paris photo they're a place where
artists give talks about their work,
so you can see what other people in your
field are doing. You can come together
you can have coffee, you can talk. I mean
some of my most interesting
conversations about photography have
happened in places like this.
So this massive project you've undertaken that's
going to take you probably
the rest of your life?
No, no I hope not, God.
What I understand I have actually seen some of
it on your websites is there any chance
we can have a quick look at it through
on your phone?
So these are some of
the sites that you're explained
to me earlier?
Yes so we've got some in California
That's in Los Angeles.
That's also in Los Angeles.
This is in Southern California,
Texas.
Now we're looking at images
that are black and white,
shot on digital and then you've
converted them in the computer.
Correct?
Yeah I've kind of used the black and white filter
when I shoot.
Oh so you,
I'm seeing it in black and white
just because I work
in black-and-white so much.
I want to know what I'm seeing
so I'm
not I'm not changing them
into color,
I'm looking at them in black and white
as I shoot.
Okay.
You know when I started this
project I was shooting with my Hassleblad
the first day and I was just doing
research and I'm kind of trying to
figure out how am I going to make this
work? How I'm going to do this project?
It was the first trip was ten days,
the very first day I was using my Hassleblad
and then I used a digital camera
just to, a little one, just to mark the spot.
Like a polaroid?
Yeah just and yeah like a polaroid to
mark the spot, then mark the paper
that said who was killed there, where it
was just so I have a record of keeping
so I can in the end I have a tally of
who's where and everything cause it's
really hard to keep all that information
together and I really liked the
photographs that I was doing digitally
and I thought whoa I just did these
calculations in my head very quickly
about film and cost and time
and I thought they're not going to be big
these images, so why not shoot them
digitally?
See we're going to convert
Diana to digital for sure.
No way no that's not true
I'm a film photographer, it is just
this project.
That's fantastic, I'm really looking forward
to seeing it when it's finished.
Well Diana thank you very much
for joining us. It's been really
insightful, I've learned a lot,
so that's it from me.
I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV
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