Self-taught photographer Melanie Pullen‘s collection of more than one hundred photographs that comprise High Fashion Crime Scenes is based on vintage creme-scene images she mined from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, the County Coroner’s Office, and other primary sources. Pullen began this project from the New York City Police Department. Drawn to the rich details and compelling stories preserved in the criminal records, in 2002 she began restaging the events after seeing a copy of Luc Sante’s 1992 book Evidence (1914-1919) about crime scene photos by outfitting the “victims” (her selected models) in current haute couture, and photographing them in her staged settings. She employed the services of up to 80 crew members and models per picture, with each image taking up to a month to create, and the series using over $13 million dollars worth of clothing and accessories. When White Canvas mag interviewed her she talked a little more about this project, saying”: As I grew desensitized to domestic crime and violence, I became more sensitized to images of war. It was a strange phenomenon that I’ve explored and philosophized. I don’t like violence, I have never been a dark person. I see stories and different layers to violent imagery. I’m curious about the response people have to violent images.

Melanie Pullen was born in New York City in 1975, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She is a self-taught photographer who raised in a a family of photojournalists, publishers and artists. Pullen’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo-shows at Ace Gallery, White Wall Gallery and MiCamera, while she has been profiled in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Beaux Arts, Artweek, Elle, BorderCrossings among others. Pullen’s series High Fashion Crime Scenes, was recently published by Narzareli Press in a 128 page hardcover book which can be found at bookstores worldwide.

SS: Each time before you start shooting one picture, do you really imagine up a whole story leading to her death? Or you just do the shoot and leave the rest to interpretation?

Melanie: I always work with the reference material - the original crime scenes that I'm recreating. Those images are normally pretty intense and I've chosen them because they force me to ask so many questions about what happened - they always evoke an emotional response and I want to explore the concept. I believe there needs to be questions and an interaction from the viewer (including myself) to create a good piece of work. I also hold true to that concept when searching for reference materiel. I'm always asking questions and trying to fill in the gaps. I have been most captivated by the images where you don't really see what happened - the evidence shots like the close up images of hands and feet as it just opens up my imagination - I find those very provoking - a few in particular have really stuck with me and I'm still asking questions.

SS: With some pictures, they’re tragic, but some there seem to be a lot of humorous elements hidden that make you smile, it’s like watching Alice in Wonderland gone darkly mischievous. What are other moods that you want to convey to the audience behind these characters.

Melanie: I tried to create a journey with the work. You notice everything but the crime scene. I'm making fun of the way violence and tragedy are portrayed by the media these days and how over the top it's become. My characters are very innocent and somewhat timeless. I generally play with colour, models, locations and these amazing cloths to really distract the viewer. I always hope that the final result is you leave my one of my exhibitions and wonder why you forgot to look at the crime scene right in front of you.

SS: You were inspired to do this from (Luc Sante's book) 'Evidence' and old crime scene photos, but do you also have any muses?

Melanie: I love movies! I could name a hundred great movies but I will save you the list. So all of the wonderful directors, cinematographers, actresses and actors are my muses. 

MICHAEL LUNDGREN Transfigurations“Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.”—Robert Smithson

As an artist, I have always been drawn to the field of landscape. It is the perfect subject with which to explore our history and our desire, two urges bound deeply together in the mythology and experience of the American West. As well, working in wild places always feels like coming home.For seven years I worked exclusively on a series entitled, Transfigurations. I began this work in 2000 as a graduate student at Arizona State University—culminating in a monograph published by Radius Books (October 2008). Born from a long-term relationship with the desert, these pictures refer to the heart of these places, not by description, but by metaphor. If I have learned anything from Postmodernism, it is that photographs are not the thing itself. Photography’s burden of representation has been lessened and yet I am still able to access real experience with these pictures. While this work is about being on the surface of the earth, the images do not proceed by literal content; their meaning comes from an engagement with the transformative capacity of photography. Through sequence they speak of a search for the elusive, through layers of phenomena unfurled as a story of desert experience.These photographs are a lust for the primitive, for what lies behind personality. They are a search to understand beauty and terror, which are bound to one utter certainty—change.In the desert nothing is static, even rocks move. Through intuition, I hope to photograph the impossible, to fix the fugitive on film. Early on, landscape was grounds for the idealization of nature—the creation of an Eden whose existence is surely at question. Contending with the devastation enacted upon the earth, landscape photography has in many ways become a medium of political motivations—a necessary pursuit given the dire circumstances. However, a summary of intention for both of these approaches might be: “Look at how wonderful nature is, but do not mistake, it is better off without us.” My work has always been an effort to shift this paradigm—we are nature. Perhaps our one chief distinction is that we are forever trying to control entropy—and things always fall apart. In Transfigurations, I hope to walk the line between apocalyptic-transcendence and our own perseverance.

the landscape is such a diverse place and nature always finds a way what what I like about this project seeing nature working plants growing out of animals, trees bent to the wind it reminds us of life. i don't think it matters that some of the images are in black and white and some in colour although I do like the black and white images they have more tonal depth.  I don't have much to say about the project  I'm finding it hard to comment i think the artist statement is very well written  it adds another levle of meanig to the project one i would not have understood if it wasent for the explanation.  i keep being drawn to the image of the hole dear skelington  ther way its illuminated like that its almost like its back lit it makes the image visually interesting

They are all photographed in the same formal manner using a tripod signifying a kind of forensic strategy at work. They are the physical evidence of the unfortunate conjunction of vehicle and animal.

this what interests me about the project the way the animals body deals with the impact of the car. the way some are pushed in to the ground and others are disfigured .


what I like about the book is first the size it works so well the images are big enough to see the detail but not to big that the book becomes hard to look at. the paper is very nice to handle matt but with a small amount of shine I don't know how to explain but its very smooth a large contrast to the photos them self most photographed on hard concrete. the subject matter is sometimes hard to look at I do find it interesting what a car can do to an animal the way the body is deformed broken bruised but I think they way he has layed it out works so well not all the gory ones are next together they spread out so you get a not so bad image and then a graphic one.  the wite pages in between each image is alot better than a darker more sinsiter colour he could have used red or something. but  White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity , Cleanliness and so on. this makes me feel different about his project i would see it in a moor positive light. the cover is interesting the only image on grass the fact the book is about rode kill  the cover doesn't show that also the title doesn't reflect that it almost tricks you I think I am just going to be looking at British wildlife. the only sign is the badger itself there is something hanging form the body I don't know what that is but it doesn't loot natural.
the back cover is bright pink along with the title i don't know how I feel about it it's not a natural colour found in British wildlife its also quite bright I think it works but I don't know why.
the text in the book is very good i like how informative and interesting to read the small righting  by John Taylor around the subject had some nice quotes and works from poems it relay brought the project together  there are also added photos amongst the text that are not in the book it's like finding a £1 in your bag you didn't know was there. the little pece of text with the image is so sad but so true i kind of feel very differently about the project now giving them a name and adress it almost makes them sound human and that is strange but i feel more for them than i would have befor I read the text
each image has the same format of text beside it and i like that consistency although I don't know the Latin turns i still think it works well like something you would find in a museum I feel like I am lurning something the rode names are also interesting putting a location to the death something to think about I find myself thinking  about the location of the animal was it an a rode or b rode are the a rode images more graphic and looking through the book this about 50 50.
the layout  of the images is nice full page images when i look through the book i am putting my hands on the images as i flick through its strange i kind of start to feel the concrete in my mind its strange but i like it if there where borders I wouldn't be doing that I wouldn't touch the images but it feels like I am touching death.

The relationship between death and representation have always been profoundly and intimately intertwined. Never more so than with the emergence of the photomechanical apparatus in the middle of the last century. So much so that some early photographic processes were called Thanatography derived from the Greek word Thanatos meaning 'death'. And some of the most startling images from that same period were images of the dead. They exemplified what Barthes would later go on to say about photography 'it must be described in relation to death'. This particular preoccupation has undergone a re-emergence in the last decade or so led by photographers like Witkin and more recently in Luc Sante's collection of forensic photography from the turn of the century amongst others. However, Clive Landen's Familiar British Wildlife series deals not with human death but with 'roadkills'. His perspective seeks out a different angle and engages a specific purpose. The ostensible content of the collection of these images is the carcasses and remains of domestic wildlife lying by the side of the road. They are all photographed in the same formal manner using a tripod signifying a kind of forensic strategy at work. They are the physical evidence of the unfortunate conjunction of vehicle and animal (although some of them are so well laid out that they seem orchestrated). The forensic reading is reinforced by the titling of the images using the precise zoological nomenclature and the road reference number indicating the general location of the event. This textual information accompanying the image is reminiscent of an exhibit from the Natural History museum, whose institutional rhetoric insists at one and the same time on the beauty and diversity of 'nature' and on the desire to control and order the chaos of Nature. The ironic mimicking of the optics of instrumental reason by Landen attempts to force a consideration of the relationship between human endeavour and wildlife and by implication 'nature' and the environment. This throws up a number of interesting questions. As a collection of images it demonstrates the reliance of the visual sign on text to anchor meaning. Representation is foregrounded in this manner. For without the text some of the images could be read as 'trophies' or examples of fine specimens or in the case of the small birds as formal and abstract studies. It could be argued that Landen's ironic take on the taxonomic impulse of Western knowledge systems performs a type of meta-documentary text where the historical antecedents and indeed the genre itself is held up for examination and commentary. The point here being that the camera has historically been in the service of science in its efforts to produce the order of things. However the ecological critique implied here is less sophisticated. Modern technological living, it is suggested, has distanced us from Nature and we need to somehow become reconnected to 'it'. This is in the crudest sense naive and simplistic. But it is a disquieting aspect which is underlined in the publicity material produced for the show that claims the work '...considers death; not just the literal death of animals themselves but the metaphoric death of an aspect of our (sic) national identity - the cherished countryside of our imagination'. The preface for the catalogue reiterates the same evocation of national identity citing Watership Down and Last of the Summer Wine as exemplars of some idyllic past. (It is important to note that it is British wildlife and the assumed audience of the catalogue is a British one). The deep and complex mythologisation of Britain as 'a green and pleasant land' teeming with wildlife should not go unchallenged. Consider for instance, the mobilisation of this myth by reactionaries and neo-conservatives in Britain with all its connotations about 'race', ethnicity, and class. (The black artists Eve Pollard and Maud Sulter have addressed these mythologies in their own photographic practices). But it also highlights some subtle but identifiable cultural differences between for example Ireland or Europe and Britain's attitudes to 'nature'. Is it only in Britain that the media construct panics about the 'barbaric' practices of Spanish religious festivals, where hunt sabotage is class war, where mothers sacrifice themselves under the wheels of trucks carrying calves and where bishops compare the same to the transportation of the Jews to the camps?. There are some deeply troubling contradictions here which remain uninterrogated. Landen's photographs are mournful, celebratory and ironic. While Landen indicates the role of the photographic apparatus and documentary discourse in the production of knowledge, their political effectiveness remains ambivalent and uncertain. It invokes a dissipated ecological critique of Modernity and its credo 'Progress' whilst forgetting that Modernity produced Nature. So if it does anything it succeeds in demonstrating the contemporary paradoxes and crisis abroad about the 'nature' of Nature and humankind's relationship to its environment. Martin McCabe

sally mann  had always subconsciously  influenced my work I don't always think about her work untill i see others and think back. this is one of thougs cases where i have looked at this work for another project but it fits so well.
the idea that this her dog adds a personal edge to the images it brings out my emotions my memorys of death in my life with my cat.  the idea the need to document makes this project intresting  its almost like resrection bringing her dog from the cold ground back to the life ontop. the dirt grounding the notion of the temporary.