True Crime

True Crime is a multimedia series and an accompanied essay exploring the non-fiction genre’s relationship to the internet and impact on social perceptions of violence, crime, and justice. I was once an avid consumer of true crime media and slowly lost interest in the subject. Since my departure from the community, I have noticed an increasingly harmful effect the genre has on its audience, and I began to recognize this effect in the ways I previously engaged with this media. I was at first horrified by what I saw as a reckless and exploitative disregard for human suffering, but this disgust was quickly replaced by curiosity. I desire not only to criticize true crime’s worst manifestations but attempt to reach a deeper understanding of why this genre attracts so much attention, and how the internet has exacerbated its worst qualities. The essay is a critical analysis of true crime media, its purveyors, and its consumers. While researching, I felt inclined to explore the topic’s visuality, and early plans for documentarian pursuits felt too closely related to the very culture I was condemning. And so, I turned fictional representations of violence and criminal justice, a media genre which I feel has the upper hand in exciting the curious mind while maintaining distance from real victims and real perpetrators. The multimedia series which resulted in a self-exploration of violence, sadism, and voyeurism that I worked on in tandem with my academic research on the topic. The images I created are not in reference to any one person or event but are the product of my meditation on the darker inclinations of the human mind. The series parodies spectacles of violence, it embraces artifice, and it allows me to indulge my morbid curiosity in a way that did not require the actual suffering of others.

The multimedia series is a combination of photography and painting, using embellishment techniques to suspend printed photographs in a space spanning both reality and fantasy. Photographs are printed on canvas, mounted, and then sections of images are embellished, obscured, or reconfigured entirely. I want viewers to consider how violence, mystery, and justice make them feel; I want to give viewers a conceptual space to explore these ideas with material that is ethically inconsequential in its production. These images divorced from names, from lives, from circumstances, are a blank slate, or rather a clean mirror, on which honest inquiry can take place.