| |
Car
Crash crucifixion: The Art of OC Register Photographer Mell Kilpatrick
The
tanker trunk is jackknifed across the 405. Don't look. Behind it
sits a totaled Pontiac, its front end crushed to the firewall, its
windshield a shroud of the driver's face. The first at the scene,
I approach the wreck on foot. The car's interior is dark; nothing
is visible at first. A Rotten.com vision
of decapitation, mangled limbs and eyeballs dangling on optical
cords makes me hesitate as
I approach the door. Frozen in anticipation, I feel the truck driver
reach over my shoulder and yank hard on the door handle. It shudders
and moans — grinding against its frame — then finally
opens to the death scene. In a procession of passing cars, the crowd
gawks
at a New Age crucifixion. It's a Mell Kilpatrick moment.
—
During
the 1950s, Kilpatrick cruised the two-lane roads of neo-natal
Orange County with his police-band radio and Speed
Graphic camera,
looking for crashes to capture on film. In the formative years
of Southern California's car culture, his beat was the aftermath
of
highway tragedy. Reflections of bent metal, dead bodies and
broken glass,
Kilpatrick's photos, like Byzantine crucifixion panels, bring
us face to face with our mortality. Tempted to turn away, we stare
with wary
fascination. His frames, frozen in time, suggest that if the crucifixion
points to the blessing of forgiveness, the crash points to the
blessing
of circumstance.
The
story of Mell Kilpatrick is about circumstance. If he were alive
today, he might say life is a series of unexpected
turns
that prove
we can never foresee how we'll be remembered.
Kilpatrick
was born in Arcola, Illinois, in 1902. An only child, he helped
with
the heavy lifting at the age of 10, when his
family moved
to Idaho in a covered wagon. They settled in the city of Windor,
where his father, James Henry, opened a slaughterhouse. Mell
wasn't prepared
for a life of meat and cleavers — at least not yet.
He married, studied coronet and dreamed of playing in a dance
band. In 1928,
determined to find a job as a musician, he moved to Southern
California with
his wife, Katherine. There, he landed a job playing the local
circuit —from
the Dianna Ballroom to the Balboa Pavilion. All the while,
he helped raise a family of five. Life was good.
Then
Kilpatrick's fortunes changed forever, re-routed by a case of
bad oral
hygiene. Flossing might have led Kilpatrick
down
a different road, but in 1947, periodontal disease prompted
the
removal of all
his teeth. It was the kiss of death for a professional horn
player. By 1948, the dentured Kilpatrick found himself commuting
from
his Santa Ana home to his new job as projectionist at the
West Coast,
Laguna and Balboa Theaters. He threaded reels of The
Big Sleep, Notorious,
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Detour and DOA. Film noir
heroes, subjects of a dark destiny, stood 20 feet tall on
the screen
as he watched. The car was a part of movie language, a symbol
of
escape, climax and danger.
The
lesson of noir wasn't lost on Kilpatrick. In late 1948, down on
his luck and with no relevant
experience, he picked
up a camera
on
a friend's suggestion and began shooting. It wasn't like
playing coronet, but photography was a paying gig.
 At
first, he photographed evidence for insurance companies, then
accidents
for the Highway Patrol. They were modern-day
memento
mori—stark,
black-and-white documents of unexpected death. Hard-boiled
and methodical, Kilpatrick surveyed each wreck and pointed
his camera inside. He framed
the decapitated body. Click. He framed the twisted front
seat and the shattered skull. Click. He framed the contorted
hand reaching
like a paraplegic David through the shattered window toward
the gathered crowd outside. Click.
—
On
another road, in 400 BC, Leontius, the son of a nobleman, came
to an intersection and confronted a similar scene.
Traveling to
Athens, he noticed the corpses of crucified men.
He was curious and wanted
to rubberneck, but something held him back. There
Leontius stood, too far away to get a good look, his appetite
in conflict with
his reason — like one of us trying to see
a northbound accident from the southbound lanes.
CalTrans
calls
this the Gawk Effect.
Leontius "felt
a longing desire to see them and also an abhorrence of them," Socrates
reports in Plato's Republic. "At first,
he turned away and shut his eyes, then, suddenly
tearing them open, Leontius said, 'Take your fill,
ye wretches, of the fair sight.'"
The
same conflict haunts us when we see Kilpatrick's photos.
Confronted with the end of a life, we
want to turn away,
but instead we stare.
—
Kilpatrick
was a student of the Gawk Effect. One day, the legend goes,
he appeared unannounced
at the Santa
Ana Register with
an envelope of death scenes in his hand.
They made him a staff photographer.
Kilpatrick
worked an 80-hour week to make a living wage. On call day and
night, his
phone
number
was at the top
of every
Orange
County law enforcement and fire department
call list, including the coroner's
office.
In the darkroom, he wore a blue technician's
coat and carefully placed each negative
in an envelope
with a
title: Wreck — Chapman and
Tustin. Fatality — Grand and La
Habra. Fatality — Crystal
Cove. Wreck — Los Alamitos. Fatality — Harbor
Boulevard.
—
There's
an enormous cultural taboo around Kilpatrick's images because
death in
western culture is increasingly
private," says Mikita
Brottman, editor of the book Car
Crash Culture. A professor of liberal arts
at the Maryland Institute College of
Art, Brottman explained
how we distance ourselves from death
and isolate the dying. Every day, we
witness a cavalcade of dead bodies on
TV, she said, but in
real life, most of us are fatality virgins.
"In
our culture, bodies in their most important moments — birth,
sex, death, illness — are
not supposed to be on display," Brottman
continued. "There's something
in this ambivalence that's clarified
in Kilpatrick's photos—we
get an aesthetic pleasure looking
death
in the face, both in the 'triumphalism
of the survivor' and
in the inspiration the encounter
provides."
Brottman
recalls the character in a Gustave Flaubert
novel who feels
suicidal
and
looks into the abyss. "Somehow,
it gives him enough interest in
existence to go on living," says
Brottman. "I
think this is the kind of mesmerizing
compulsion evoked by the Kilpatrick
photographs — what Conrad
calls 'the fascination of the
abomination' — which
is, in the end, life-affirming."
I
ask Brottman to describe her
gut reaction to Kilpatrick's photos.
I wonder if
she'll say, "Take your fill,
ye wretches, of the fair sight."
"The
Kilpatrick images are not violent or macabre to me, but peaceful
and poignant," Brottman
says. "As with crucifixion
images, there's a kind of
beatitude in the faces of
the onlookers,
as though
seeing the transcendence of
death for the first time."
—
Can
the car crash and the crucifix be seen in the
same light? Pastor
Fred
Plummer of
Irvine
United
Church of
Christ doesn't
think so.
"The
idea of the crucifixion being just a death — like a car
crash — misses
the point," he
says. "The
crucified were being
punished for an action
they took
that was an affront
to the Roman Empire.
What
Jesus did was intentional.
He died for what he
believed in.
"On
the other hand," Plummer continues, "if you race down
the 405 and crash,
the only risk you were taking is driving too fast. That's hardly
the same."
But
outside the context of social contracts — and
through the amoral
perspective of
Kilpatrick's lens — the crucifix
and the crash
form a curious parallel.
Like the crucifix,
the crash is a
vehicle of public death — an
admonition on
a road leading into town.
Like the crucifix,
the crash is a
mechanism for the death of innocence,
signaling the
rest of us to behold a
person just like
us — dressed
for work or the
bowling alley or Cub Scouts
or a bar—and
come to terms
with our mortality.
We
look at a crash
and say to ourselves, "Thank
God it wasn't
me."
Jesus
uttered a similar
prayer at
his crucifixion:
thank
God it isn't
you.
—
 After
his death in 1962, Kilpatrick's
negatives
sat in his
Santa Ana darkroom
for 35
years before
falling
into the
hands of
Southern California
art dealer
and collector Jennifer Dumas.
Out of
boxes containing
more than
5,000 negatives,
Dumas
compiled
a collection
she
published
as Car
Crashes & Other Sad Stories, a 176-page coffee
table book of the dead. As Kilpatrick might have said, "We
can never
foresee how we'll be remembered."
"My
background is photography," Dumas says, "and especially
vernacular
photography, which is the current buzzword for accidental art or street photography —art
that was
made for some purpose
other
than aesthetic reasons."
For
whatever purpose
this
art was made,
Kilpatrick,
an
unknown
Orange
County
photographer
of the
1950s is now
a posthumous
member
of the art
scene.
He has
been
called
a "West Coast Weegee." But Weegee,
a New York news photographer
who
recorded
the seedy side of
New
York
with a Speed Graphic
camera
in the '30s and '40s,
was
much
more
in love
with
fame.
Parlaying
his
crime
scene photography into
a
career as a photographer for
Vogue,
Weegee eventually became
a
technical consultant on a number of
Hollywood
productions, including Stanley
Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove.
Kilpatrick,
by
contrast, was
an accidental
photographer,
a
kind of real-life
film
noir hero
who
never
lived
to
see
his work
praised
by
scenesters. First,
they're
on
the front
page
of the Santa
Ana
Register. Then,
as
if in
a
pre-mortem flash
forward,
his
photographs are hanging
in
museums and
regarded as companions
to
the car-crash
silk
screens
of
Andy
Warhol.
The
pop
art
similarity
ends
there.
Kilpatrick
was
simply
doing
his
job.
Warhol
was
pursuing
celebrity
by
exploiting
the
Gawk
Effect.
Warhol's
car-crash
canvases,
like
much
of
his
work
in
the
1960s,
were
repeated
images.
His Five
Deaths
on
Orange or
Five
Deaths
Seventeen
Times
in
Black
and
White
were
composed
of
identical
car-crash
photographs
taken
on
the
streets
of
New
York
City.
The
effect
was
pop
Kilpatrick,
and
the
critics
loved
it.
"The
car's democratic banality reduces those who die in it to unidentified,
dishonored statistics, as Warhol realized," said The
London Observer's Peter Conrad about
Five Deaths on Orange.
Wrong.
Warhol wanted
our attention.
His compositions
weren't about "democratic
banality." They
were about Leontius's fair sight. Warhol
could easily have achieved the same
effect if he had decided to reproduce
Five Crucifixions Seventeen Times
in Black and White.
—
Kilpatrick's
photographs are
also cultural
companions to
J.G. Ballard's
book Crash.
Ballard created
a neo-Gothic
world in
which collision
videos replace
pornography, celebrity car crashes
are ritualized,
and sex
in and
around accident
scenes is
a kind
of underground
entertainment. Ballard,
like Warhol,
exploited Leontius's
Gawk Effect.
In Crash,
a crowd
fills the
seats at
the reenactment
of James
Dean's car-crash
death as
if it
were an
Easter Mass.
After all,
what would
a crucifixion
be without
an audience?
But Crash
is better
remembered for
mixing wrecks
and sex — maybe wrex? This auto-erotic combination
was celebrated in pop music with Daniel Miller's Crash-inspired
song Warm
Leatherette. What hip, young '80s romantic couldn't
croon, "The
hand brake penetrates your thigh — quick: let's
make love before you die"?
While
the aesthetic
of "Warm Leatherette" was the mere collision
of animal and intellectual, Ballard believed that
our world was fast becoming a victim of its own
machinery. "We
live in a world that is now entirely artificial," Ballard
said. As a result of this artifice, Crash's characters
lose touch. Their senses become cross-wired
and shorted-out. In this benumbed state, emotions
are illusory. Encounters with the face of death
are
played out in mind games, entertainment
and, yes, sex because it's one of the few other
psychological
spaces — besides
death — where
language stops.
Cyberpunk
doom aside,
though, it's
hard to
say that
we ever
speak to
the face
of death,
unless, of
course, we're
dead. So
I wonder:
Is Ballard
giving an
overdose of
technology too
much credit?
Is this
really the
reason we're
silent in
death's presence?
The answer
is in
Kilpatrick's photographs.
—
I
visited Kilpatrick's
granddaughter Carlene
Thie at
her ranch-style
home in
Mira Loma
a few
months ago.
We sat
at the
kitchen table,
ate banana
bread and
sorted through
his car-crash
negatives.
"I
sold the most gruesome ones," she said. "They
brought a bad vibe to the
house."
Kilpatrick
didn't
especially like his crash
scenes,
either. Carlene told me
he was a reluctant
photographer of car
fatalities. "It
was just a job," she
said.
On
staff at
the Register,
Kilpatrick took
tens of
thousands of
photographs — grand
openings, parades,
celebrity and official
photo opportunities
ad nauseum. His real
love was his Disneyland
photography — which
Thie self-published
in three
volumes.
But
his car-crash
photographs remain
best known.
Something unique
is expressed
in these
images — a singular
reverence made
apparent
when the audience
witnesses the vanishing
point of life.
It's an element of the
crucifixion we've
stripped away from
mainstream Christianity — the
moment when the
crowd confronts
the
tortured, lifeless
body of Jesus and
stares in silence.
Mikita Brottman
says, "The
power of the
Kilpatrick
images communicates
something beyond
language. They're
more powerful than
other images
of atrocity precisely
because of the presence
of the
observers."
These
observers exist
outside of
any cultural
framework. Within
the vacuum
of the
car-crash crucifixion,
they've lost
their social
moorings. In
Kilpatrick's
photos,
there are
no heroes
or allegiances
or patriotism
or beliefs — no
Action News
Team or God
or country
or embedded
journalist.
There's only the
space between
the observer
and death.
"What the observers are seeing is something they can never live to
talk about," Brottman says. "So
witnessing death like this has
the quality of a dream. It reveals
the frightening truth that
there are some things we can
never communicate, which raises the
question of whether we can ever really
communicate anything. As [Joseph] Conrad
said, 'We live as we dream: alone.'"
—
I
flash back to that Pontiac on the 405 whenever I leaf through
Kilpatrick's car-crash photos. There, I'm part of the crowd
that's gawking at the crucifixion. When the tanker truck
driver opens
the car door, the audience in the long line of passing cars
gawks at the Pontiac's lifeless display: a shattered femur
protrudes
through a pant leg, drops of dark maroon trickle to the
floor mat, a distorted face with scalp pulled back from its forehead — as
if blowing in the rushing wind — rests on the luminescent
dash. Here in my own Mell Kilpatrick moment, the dead have
risen from the boundaries of circumstance.
They
have risen, and the angels rejoice.
They have risen, and I am witness.
They have risen, and life is affirmed.
To them — in the gaze of Mell Kilpatrick's lens — be
glory and power forever and ever. Amen.
— Nathan Callahan,
April 17, 2003
|
|
