In The Wake

The photographic installation, In the Wake, consists of photograms—black-and-white prints created by shining light through a piece of paper onto photo-sensitive paper below—made from the autopsy reports of eight individuals: Stephon Clark, Jonathan Ferrell, Laquan McDonald, Ezell Ford, Terrance Kellom, Ronald Johnson, Michael Brown, and Kendrec McDade. All were young, unarmed black men killed by police officers in the past decade. Accompanying the eight autopsy prints is a quotation from a New York Times editorial written by poet Claudia Rankine following the murder of nine black worshippers by a white supremacist shooter at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.

While autopsy reports are typically kept private, each of the reports reproduced in In the Wake was released to the public by the families of the deceased, and were provided as evidence in the trial of the officer who committed the shooting. The markings noted on each report record various forms of bodily trauma suffered by the deceased (for example, GSW is an abbreviation of “gunshot wound”), along with the depth and angle of the injury.

All images are handprinted 20“ x 24” silver gelatin prints