A woman I photographed a few months ago in Guatemala was killed
recently, shot 14 times by someone who hasn’t been identified and will probably
not be caught. She was a prostitute and a drug addict. I drank beers with her
once as I often do with people who live in the so-called sub-mundo. I never even knew her name. I took her picture and that’s
all.
I’m not going to wax poetic or try to turn some clever
phrase to make this piece of writing more dramatic or tragic. A woman is dead
and it’s a miserable, piss-poor thing to find out about while walking down the
street taking pictures.
I know perfectly well that “shit happens.” The world is a
rough, dangerous place. There are bad people lurking not only in the shadows,
but strolling down boulevards in broad daylight. It’s true that victims are
sometimes people who put themselves in harm’s way. But the sanctity of this
woman’s life was the same as anyone else’s.
Nor do I live under any illusions. A number of people I’ve
photographed are dead, probably more than I know or would care to know about.
On one hand, this makes me feel disgusted by the work I do. I did not set out
to be a photographer for obituaries of the future. I feel tainted by a hatred
and a violence that are not my own.
On the other hand, this kind of murder is an attempt to render
a person invisible. Even as I accept (with great difficulty) that other people
I have known and photographed will be killed in similarly jaw-dropping ways, I
take a real and true pride in these small picture-gestures, which make it
absolutely impossible for anyone to rub these people’s memories from the face
of the earth. Let other artists manufacture emotion and sell it the way real
estate agents sell land. I will do my tiny part to draw attention to this terrible,
generalized, global violence against men, women and children. This cannot go on
forever. We cannot become an impotent community that says “terrible things will
always happen, and oh well, what can you do?”
Monsignor Oscar Romero, gunned down at the closing of a mass
in San Salvador, said the punishment for murder was ex-communication, not only
from the church, but from the “community of God,” by which he meant the whole
world.
“It is the repudiation of an entire community saying to the
criminal, ‘You now have nothing to do with the people who walk with hope, who
obey the law of God, who don’t want blood, who want love, who want peace, who
want reconciliation.’ And this gesture of the community that ex-communicates is
without hate, just as the scream that rejects violence is without hate.”
I confess that a killer’s symbolic removal from society under
Roman Catholic doctrine doesn’t offer much relief. But when acts of heart-wrenching cruelty happen, we
should remember, as Romero reminds us, that we are a society, here to protect each
other, and to cast out those who do unspeakable things.
She was an older woman, the kind you might see at a
laundrymat, and she was no threat to anyone. Maybe she really pissed somebody
off. Maybe she was a killer herself. She was not remarkable or beautiful. She
was a mom, daughter, sister, and according to what she told me, somebody’s
ex-wife. She never finished elementary school. She took drugs to dull the pain
and wretched indignity of having sex with people for the equivalent of about
four dollars on a rotting, broken matress in a hotel you’ve never heard of in
Guatemala City. I remember she said she hated herself.
Somebody else hated her more.
