Death 

in the Browser Tab

There you are watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror. It arrives, absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passer-by, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it.

A video introduces new elements into the event it records. It can turn a private grief into a public spectacle, set popular opinion at odds with expert analysis. I have seen too many such videos in the past year. I watched the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun in a Cleveland park. I watched a police officer put a protesting Eric Garner into a chokehold that moments later proved fatal. I watched Charly Leundeu Keunang tussle with police officers in Los Angeles before he was shot six times. And there was much I could have watched but opted not to: the ISIS beheading videos, the various other clips of deadly violence from around the world. Even so, I felt that death had come within too-easy reach, as easy as opening up a browser and pressing play. I recognized the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the grief of those for whom the deaths were much more significant, and intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong.

The fact that a photograph

exists of a man being shot

in the head in Vietnam is

easier to remember than his

biography or even his name.

For most of human history, to see someone die, you had to be there. Depictions of death, if there were any, came later, at a certain remove of time and space. The day after I watched the Scott video, it so happened that I taught my students at Bard about a series of woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein’s woodcuts, designed around 1526 and titled “Pictures of Death,” show Death arriving for his victims: a nun at prayer, a farmer plowing his field, a pope on his throne, a knight in full armor. Considering these prints made me understand something about videos like those of Scott’s death: they are part of a long line of images of the moment of death, an engagement with that mysterious instant in which a self is deprived of itself.

The first photographs about death did not capture the exact moment of its arrival. They were post-mortem pictures. The genre flowered in the 19th century, fostered in part by the technical limitations of photography: The dead don’t move, and a portrait of a corpse was easier to make than one of a living person. This was at a time when death still happened in the home. The bereaved propped up their beloved dead, dressed them in good clothes and had them photographed as though they were still alive. But post-mortem pictures, with their melancholy grandeur and intimate setting, are different from images that capture the rude shock of sudden death.

A still image from a video showing the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina, caught by Feidin Santana. 

Credit Video still from Diimex

Robert Capa’s famous 1936 photograph of a Spanish militiaman purports to record such a moment: The militiaman falls backward on a sunlit battlefield, his body accelerating to meet its shadow. The photograph is contested now — was it staged, or was it truly caught, by serendipity and skill, in the heat of battle? — but it is an image that, for its time, is imaginable. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to make a picture like it half a century earlier. And by 32 years later, in a world full of small cameras and quick-loading film, there is no longer any doubt that death can be photographed candidly. On a street in Saigon, the American photojournalist Eddie Adams clicks the shutter and captures the precise moment at which Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese general, fatally shoots Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong commander, in the head. A second before the bullet hits Lem, his face is relaxed. Then the shot — simultaneously of the gun and the camera — but there’s no blood, no splatter, only Lem’s face contorted in mortal agony. A second later he’s on the ground, blood gushing out of his head. We know these things because the execution was also captured on film, by Vo Suu, a cameraman for NBC. Suu’s footage is invaluable, but Adams’s picture, more striking and more iconic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The picture was remarkable for the rarity of its achievement, in recording the last moment, unscripted and hardly anticipated, of someone’s life. But when you see death mediated in this way, pinned down with such dramatic flair, the star is likely to be death itself and not the human who dies. The fact that a photograph exists of a man being shot in the head in Vietnam is easier to remember than Lem’s biography or even his name.

“The Nun, from The Dance of Death,” a woodcut designed by Hans Holbein the Younger. 

Credit From the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Having watched the video of Scott’s death once, I now watched it a second time, to figure out where exactly it had been made. I was in Columbia, S.C., for work, and friends there had driven me to North Charleston. Michael Slager stopped Scott in the parking lot of Advance Auto Parts on Remount Road and asked him some questions. At some time during the interaction, Scott fled. Where to? We found the parking lot. I went on foot, taking a left down Craig Road, following the route of the chase, a minute’s walk, shorter if one were to run. Below a hand-painted sign for a Mega Pawn shop was a narrow, disused lot with a pale storage building on one side and a row of trees on the other, a scene both derelict and bucolic. At the entrance to the lot were a new chain secured by a new padlock, and a bunch of flowers, now drooping, wrapped in plastic and wedged into a chain-link fence. This was the officer’s point of view as he steadied himself, raised his .45-caliber Glock 21 and fired eight times at the back of the man running away from him.

In the near distance, just to the left of the paved track that bisected the grass, was a small memorial at the spot where Scott fell. This was not only the scene of a crime. It also made visible things that were not apparent in the video: the last view Scott saw, the exit from the lot, the unnerving quietness of the area, the banality of dying in a side lot off a side street in an unremarkable town. And being there also revealed, in the negative, the peculiarities of the video, peculiarities common to many videos of this kind: the combination of a passive affect and the subjective gaze, irregular lighting and poor sound, the amateur videographer’s unsteady grip and off-camera swearing. Taken by one person (or a single, fixed camera) from one point of view, these videos establish the parameters of any subsequent spectatorship of the event. The information they present is, even when shocking, necessarily incomplete. They mediate, and being on the lot helped me remove that filter of mediation somewhat.

Later that day, back in Columbia, I had dinner with Tony Jarrells, a professor of English literature at the University of South Carolina. Jarells suggested I read “The Two Drovers,” a story by Sir Walter Scott (the coincidence of names is what reminded him of it). That story, first published in 1827, is about a pair of cattle herders, or drovers, working in the borderlands of England and Scotland. Harry, a Yorkshireman, and Robin, a Highlander, had a dispute about pasturage for their cattle. Harry challenged Robin to a fistfight and, when Robin refused, knocked him down. Robin, in response, walked “seven or eight English miles,” got his dirk (a short knife), walked back and stabbed Harry dead. This was the core of the story, Jarells suggested to me: the stretch of time over which Robin intended his crime, those two hours of premeditation. When there is premeditation, over hours or over a few seconds, the final moment is accompanied by the weight of the moments preceding it, moments necessary to establish that quantum of moral disregard out of which one person kills another. The video from North Charleston seemed to enact this disregard, this voiding of empathy, in seconds that felt like hours, seconds in which the shooter could have stopped and reconsidered, just as the drover Robin could also have stopped and reconsidered, but didn’t.

The videographic afterimage of a real event is always peculiar. When the event is a homicide, it can cross over into the uncanny: the sudden, unjust and irrevocable end of the long story of what one person was, whom he loved, all she hoped, all he achieved, all she didn’t, becomes available for viewing and reviewing. A month after I went to North Charleston, back in Brooklyn and writing about the shooting, I find a direct approach difficult.

I write about Holbein’s “Pictures of Death,” and about Robert Capa’s photograph and Eddie Adams’s. I write about “The Two Drovers,” about Robin tramping through the borderlands intent on murder. I write about my morning in North Charleston, the gloomy drive there and back and the wilted flowers on the chain-link fence on Craig Road. If you set enough tangents around a circle, you begin to recreate the shape of the circle itself. Finally, I start to watch footage of Scott’s last moments. It’s the third time, and it makes me uneasy and unhappy. The video begins with the man holding the camera racing toward the fence. A few seconds later, Walter Scott breaks away from Michael Slager. Slager plants his feet and raises his gun. There is still time. He shoots once, then thrice in quick succession. Scott continues to run. There is still time. That is when I stop the video and exit the browser.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/magazine/death-in-the-browser-tab.html?_r=0