Whelp, that was disgusting.

Something I'm not sure how to say without causing people to raise a suspicious eyebrow my direction, but the unedited forensic photos of Elizabeth Short's crime scene and autopsy were leaked in the 1950s (most likely by the LAPD themselves), and have been available for decades in, shall we say, "specialty" publications. A Google image search with Safe Search turned completely off will turn them up in a few minutes.

So nothing was accomplished by showing them in this exhibit, since anyone who, for whatever reason, wants to see them, already has.

This is such an odd review, as Gwen skipped the rest of the show after seeing the Black Dahlia section in the front. I totally respect the author's decision to leave the show in disgust, but the review doesn't really confront the sociological implications of the public's attraction to the show, and the fascination with forensics and CSI in general.

I remember seeing one of the photos of Short in a library book about Hollywood sandals back in the late 80's and being fascinated. Combined with films of the aftermath of car crashes shown in driver's ed it reinforced my switch from Catholicism to Athieism. While the people in the pictures had once lived, and they obviously suffered horrible deaths, it was hard for me to believe in a human soul and afterlife when seeing bodies that had been reduced to meat.

In grad school I had a visiting speaker who had collected images of lynchings from the south in the 1920s. Public Enemy had used one of the pictures as an album cover for the "Hazy Shade of Criminal" EP. There would be the body of a dead black male hanging from a tree with crowds of white people standing around smiling and pointing. These pictures would be copied and shared among the community in a sick ritual of dehumanization.

Where does this show stand in the context of our history of pictures of other's suffering? Is it voyeurism? Fascination with criminal acts? Is there something wrong with a public that lines up to see a show like this? What is the context of the LAPD using this show to lionize their work? Or maybe I should just re-read my copy of Susan Sontag "Regarding the Pain of Others".

"Consuming Human Tragedy and Suffering"

If anything this phrase describes USA as a nation. In the early days the whole wealth of USA was build on slavery. In the modern world it is build on continuous warfare and exploitation of weaker nations. Like Iraq, let us not kid ourselves. USA, like the savage entity it is, attacked it because it wants to capitalise [read: steal] the oil resources of that country.

Someone with better historical knowledge or the time to research can provide the specifics, but people haven't always been shielded from seeing horrific things at least a few times in their lives. For the vast majority of the time humans have been around, we saw our dismembered, disemboweled, and otherwise disfigured fellows on a more regular basis. Some cultures probably still see it more than others.

I'm not saying that this exhibit isn't disturbing, but I am saying that it may be disturbing because of our current mores. And from what I can tell, those mores are under pretty serious attack. For example, I saw the Magruder film a bunch of times growing up, but until the movie JFK, had never seen the horrific part. Now we see it all the time. How many slasher films are now available at Blockbuster? and torture films on the web? A single night of television can net you visions of two or three rendered human bodies. I was involved in the internet early on as a developer and one of the first very popular sites was one that had thousands of gruesome images - I don't think they were ever collected in one place before that. That site has only grown in size and popularity over the last 16 years and spawned many more like it. All those images are of real people, too.

I think this raises a bunch of questions. Is this just natural animal curiosity or something else? Do humans always get a charge out of seeing this stuff, even when it's not prohibited generally? Or does prohibiting it for the most part, give it more power? Does being curious about it mean that we have less sympathy about what the person went through? Or can we look at it and see it in some other way?

I have no idea about any of it, nor do I really want to know. The older I get, the less I'm able to handle watching real violence or its aftereffects. I happened on an "art" book that ostensibly looked at the Black Dahlia murder in a new light. I was literally sick for days after seeing those images.