Today the Boston Globe presented a "rarely seen" set of photographs taken by and with police chief Dominick Arena at the scene of Kennedy's infamous 1969 car crash in Chappaquiddick. While one photo shows Arena sitting on the undercarriage of the submerged vehicle (making him a live figure in a scenario that implies destruction, uncanniness, death, etc.), the shot of the Oldsmobile underwater strikes me as a beautiful juxtaposition of water and mechanics. Other photographs of cars out of their trajectory, many dating from the 1950s and 1960s, include bodies, alive and dead, shadowy and clear, some absent from the image but implicit in the situation. From raw mortuary photography to considerations of what a car "should" be for and with humans and the surrounding landscape, I am transfixed. Some of my favorites: Stan Healy, crime photographer from Missoula, Montana. Weegee. Warhol's Saturday Disaster (1964) is part of the Rose Art Museum's collection.
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