Diana Matar: My America

“…What does it mean to live in a land where the people responsible for protecting its citizens can so often be involved in their deaths?”

 In the US, approximately 1000 people continue to die each year in encounters with police. More than any other industrialised nation. My America is an archive of and memorial to victims of these encounters. The photographs, taken at locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers, create a quiet but chilling critique of the contemporary United States. The scale of the book attests to the scale of the problem yet Matar asks us to remember these are individuals.

Diana Matar grew up in California and lives in London. She has a MA from the Royal College of Art and is the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art; the International Fund for Documentary Photography; and has twice been awarded an Arts Council England Individual Artist Grant. Installations of her photographic work are held in public collections and/or have exhibited at major institutions including: Tate Modern; Museum of Fine Art Houston; British Museum; Imperial War Museum; Museum Folkswang, Essen, Germany; George Eastman House; Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago; Musée de la Photographie a Charleroi and many others. Her monograph Evidence was published in 2014 by Schilt Publishing and in 2019 Matar was appointed Distinguished Artist at Barnard College Columbia University, New York.

“In a world where millions of pictures are taken each day, I still believe photographs can contain meaning; they can become evidence of things not seen or heard… if, as I believe, to photograph is a desire to know something deeply and beyond the surface, I must be quiet to see. And attending to something says I acknowledge it matters.” – Diana Matar

My America
Diana Matar
GOST, April 2204
Hardcover, 304 pages, 110 images
25.4 x 19.5 cm
RRP £50

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