Spread from Meiselas's notebook in the field
In 1990, the Liz Claiborne Foundation invited me and five other artists to work on billboard and bus shelter ads for a campaign in San Francisco to raise public awareness about domestic violence. As a documentary photographer, my instinct was to find a way to work with the police. Essentially, I hit a brick wall. I was hanging around the police station, trying to get information. I saw their reports were accumulating in folders on their desks and I began to read them and ask questions.
I had been paired up with a specialized investigative team that goes back to the domestic violence crime scenes and tries to gather additional information from witnesses. I asked them permission to go out with them to get a sense of what they were up against.
-SM
Contact sheet from 'Archives of Abuse'
Bruised woman who was a victim of domestic violence. San Francisco. 1992.
Bruised woman who was a victim of domestic violence. San Francisco. 1992.
Aftermath in hotel. San Francisco, 1991.
I remember arriving with them at the scene of a homicide in a small hotel downtown and watching the police photographer at work. I was frustrated at not being permitted to take pictures myself. But I was given permission to select the reports that I found most interesting and to look at the photographic evidence that accompanied them. I decided to work with what already existed, instead of generating my own photographs. Then I agreed to go back to the victims and get their permission to use this material for my collages. Susan Breall, at the San Francisco's D.A.'s office, contacted the women and arranged for me to go to their homes and talk to them.
- SM
Bruised woman who was a victim of domestic violence. San Francisco. 1992.
Diagram showing "Cycle of Violence."
In my experience, domestic violence is a pattern offense. The literature talks about the "cycle of violence," and about "battered women's syndrome." There may or may not be a typical battered woman, but in my experience, there is a cycle and it happens over and over again. There's the honeymoon stage when things are really wonderful, and there's the stage when the tension builds, and then there's the eruption of the violence and then you make up. Usually that's right at the time you're about to go to trial, and he is calling her from jail, and then they're getting married in the holding cell by the judge who's about to be the presiding judge on the case.
- Susan Breall, Assistant District Attorney
San Francisco District Attorney's Office
Police photo of Amy's arm after her attack, 1995
Interview with survivor detailing her attack.
Photographic evidence of a domestic violence scene aftermath