It has only been a few weeks, but I can already feel the events in Las Vegas slipping away from me. The horror that unfolded there is indelible: A single shooter killed at least 58 people and injured hundreds more. And yet the horror is not indelible; it is fading, as most public tragedies eventually do. (You might even have wondered, reading the above, Which events in Las Vegas?) Since Oct. 1, there has been a terrorist attack in New York City, a mass shooting in Texas and other gun violence throughout the country, as well as numerous distressing public scandals. What trace of these events remains for those of us not personally affected by them? Names, dates, photographs, videos: all retrievable, but most archived away in a cloud of faint memory.
After mass killings, American newspapers do not typically run images of corpses. The reasons have to do with respect for the dead and concern for readers’ sensitivities, as well as restrictions put on photojournalists’ access to crime scenes (these conventions are subtly, and unjustly, different when it comes to international stories). Instead of photographs of bloody bodies in the street, we get photographs of ambulances, medical professionals, law enforcement, people ducking for cover. A photograph we’ve all seen is of someone in distress being cradled in someone else’s arms. Another is of the candlelit vigils held in the aftermath of these horrors. The raw pathos inherent in such moments is now dulled; seen once too often, the situations are not as moving as they ought to be. But even with these diminishing returns, the press is obligated to run pictures. Among them, which are piercing? Which endure? The minor ones, the odd and peculiar ones, the ones that evoke some other history.
The images that have stayed with me from the Las Vegas massacre are of broken glass. Stephen Paddock sprayed bullets down on country-music concertgoers from a suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort, smashing two of its windows in order to do so. For photographers arriving after the massacre, it would have made sense to look up and shoot the building (the shared vocabulary between cameras and firearms is both regrettable and illuminating), aiming in the opposite direction to the killer’s nighttime shots. What these photographers would have seen was a golden building, its front part protuberant and vaguely ship-shaped. The hotel’s windows are gaudy in the Vegas style, covered with a thin layer of gold. Near the top of the building are two irregular shapes, nine panels apart, one of them on the building’s prow, the other on its starboard. They look like small black stains or asterisks, or perhaps even like a pair of gouged-out eyes: These are the broken windows.
The postmassacre photographs of the building are documents of fact. They do not feel like “works of art,” nor are they intended to be. But they have a collective ability to draw our attention to the void behind the broken windows, not only the unilluminated void where windows were broken but also the inhumane void that possessed the murderer’s soul, the mournful void that overtook the survivors and the abysmal void beneath our way of life, from which a bewildering violence erupts incessantly.
Glass is everywhere in photography. From Eugène Atget’s reflective vitrines to Lee Friedlander’s sly self-portraiture, photographers have long been in thrall to the visual complications glass can inject into a composition. Glass is present not only as photography’s seductive subject but also as its physical material. Photographs were commonly made on wet-plate negatives (glass coated with photosensitive emulsion) in the 19th century, and then on the improved and portable dry-plate negatives, before film was manufactured at a sufficient strength in the 20th century to serve as a transportable medium for photographic emulsion. Sometimes the very glass of the negative becomes part of the photograph’s story.
Andre Kertesz photographed a view over Montmartre in 1929, presumably through an open window. Kertesz left Paris and moved to New York and was not reunited with the negative until the 1960s, by which time it was cracked and badly damaged. But this damage became the story. Looking at Kertesz’s 1970 print of the negative, it’s easy to think that what we are seeing is a photograph of a city through a broken window, perhaps one shot through with a bullet. It is in fact a photograph of a city printed from a damaged glass-plate negative.
