NIGHT MONSTERS

“... we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated monster: whom we isolate because we recognize him as living within us.”
- James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

There is a current of violence that flows freely throughout American life, as well as Western culture at large, the depths of which have no apparent limit. There are endless perils as our culture becomes increasingly binary and reason is replaced with reaction. Night Monsters is a series of photographs that evaluates cycles of violence and revenge portrayed in contemporary cinema, specifically narratives involving institutionalized torture, bullying, and sharks. These varied and seemingly disconnected trends reflect and reinforce our societal views, rarely asking the viewer to consider who, or what, are the actual monsters.

Sharks are routinely portrayed as evil incarnate, striking irrational fear triggered by the perpetuation of them as malevolent leviathans. They are depicted as vengeful and capable of holding a grudge against humanity, hunting and killing us with gleeful intent. The film Jaws was released in 1975. In the years immediately following, the population of great white sharks dropped 50% on the eastern seaboard and by nearly 80% between 1986 and 2000.

 Hollywood has also directly impacted the public perception of the CIA and other US intelligence branches, often working in tandem to manufacture a positive public image. The cavalier attitude that the ends justify the means has long been perpetuated in cinema. Violent interrogation is not brutality, but rather an instrument of truth; those inflicting torture are widely characterized as protestant redeemers bringing justice to a bestial and subhuman enemy. Vengeance is just punishment and laws are portrayed as pointless; inadvertently protecting villains in the name of due process.

 Due process is similarly jettisoned in films where teen bullies are dealt comeuppance. A bully is, by definition, a person or group using superior power to intimidate. However, the vindictive recompense carried out by teens against their aggressors in popular cinema is routinely portrayed as justified, if not heroic; the aggressors are maligned, treated as undeserving of a fair trial themselves, as their victims exact violent retribution.

 Immersion in the cinema of a particular culture or a specific period in history offers a portal into that place and time. Night Monsters explores what someone from another place, another time might come to understand about us.