Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Officer Involved - Citizen Down

In the United States, there is no official accounting of the people killed by police. To address that void in information, non-governmental and news organizations have been collecting data on such incidents.

Intercept data artist Josh Begley’s new project, “Officer Involved,” uses databases on police brutality compiled by The Guardian and the Washington Post to present the problem in a new way. Begley’s project (like several others he has done) is an intervention that makes visible the violence behind the way we live. “Officer Involved” reveals the lack of innocence in the landscape, and, without sensationalism or sentimentality, challenges us to think about a deep injustice that so many of us accept as normal.

In row after row, we see photographs of corners, streets, suburbs, towns, all in daylight, almost all free of human presence. All these images — in spite of the mysterious lyric beauty of some of them — were captured indiscriminately by the all-seeing eye of Google, either with a bird’s-eye view or at street level. They were then selected and set into an array by Begley. In one sense, they are the same as any other stills randomly pulled from Google Maps. But when we look at these photographs in particular, we are also seeing the last thing that some other human being saw. It is an immersion in the environment of someone’s last moments.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/09/officer-involved/

A direct link to the photo website is here:

https://theintercept.co/officer-involved/

And a link to "The Counted" is here:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

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