Working the Room. Geoff Dyer

*Actually, they are even more similar than I thought: although Jones Griffiths’ image is printed in black-and-white in Vietnam Inc., it was shot in colour.

       Enrique Metinides

      Turns out they could be wrong about suffering after all, the Old Masters. As famously evoked by W. H. Auden, everyone ‘turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’ of the boy falling out of the sky in Brueghel’s Icarus. As recorded by Enrique Metinides such incidents attract crowds of spectators whose faces reflect our own shocked fascination with carnage.

      For almost half a century Enrique Metinides photographed death and disaster in and around his native Mexico City. Stabbings, shootings, suicides, drownings, fires, freak accidents (‘A high voltage cable snaps loose and hits a man walking along Tacuba Street …’), natural and unnatural disasters – Metinides’ work is a crash-course in the diverse ways people get mangled and killed. If something terrible happened, Metinides was there with his camera, recording not just the wreckage but the way such incidents became sites of instant pilgrimage. He spent most of his career working for the mass-circulation Mexican tabloid La Prensa. To that extent he pandered to an atrocious appetite for calamity and mishap; such is the single-mindedness with which he pursued this line of work, however, that it does not seem inappropriate to speak of his devotion to the subject.

      Metinides was born in 1934 and began taking pictures of car accidents when he was twelve. (At the same age, in France, in the early 1900s, another prodigy, Jacques Henri Lartigue, had taken photographs of the idyllic dawn of the automobile era.) The cops let this precocious kid – El Nino, they called him – hang around the precinct, allowed him to take pictures of prisoners in custody, the injured, the dead. The first photographs he’d ever taken were of moments from his favourite movies – snapped while they were being projected on screen – and what happened next was like something from the film City of God: while Metinides was photographing a car crash the crime photographer of La Prensa approached the boy and hired him as his assistant. Still in his early teens Metinides began to learn his trade in earnest, honing his technique and becoming a regular at the hospitals, crime scenes, morgues and crash sites that would be his stamping ground for the next forty years. Like Weegee, Metinides became a part of the scenes he depicted, especially when – again like Weegee – he began using shortwave radios (up to four at a time) to tune in to police and ambulance frequencies so that he would arrive at the incident alongside the emergency services.

      Metinides has continued to keep abreast of the technological potential for tracking disaster. Since 1997, when he stopped taking photographs, he has turned his attention to the moving image, monitoring catastrophes on a bank of TVs in his apartment, compiling the kind of taxonomy of ‘crash sequences’ itemised by DeLillo in White Noise: ‘Cars with cars. Cars with trucks. Trucks with buses. Motorcycles with cars. Cars with helicopters. Trucks with trucks.’

      To say that his interest in such things is sensationalist or exploitative is to utter a banality along the lines of ‘Pain hurts.’ But by implicating us in the reciprocity of gawp – onlookers stare blankly at the camera; we stare back, our eyes flicking from them to the mangled cyclist in the foreground – the pictures exempt themselves (and us) from the hypocrisy mercilessly exposed by Thomas Bernhard in his final novel Extinction. The narrator’s parents have been killed in a car wreck and he is appalled by the ‘ruthless cruelty’ of the tabloid press and their ‘abominable pictures’ of the death-scene.

      They even printed a large photograph of my mother’s headless body. I gazed at this picture for a long time, though all this time was naturally afraid that someone might come into the kitchen and catch me at it … Each paper felt obliged to outdo the next in vulgarity. Family wiped out, screamed one headline, under which I read, Three concert-goers mutilated beyond recognition. Full report and pictures centre pages. I at once searched for the centre pages, shamelessly leafing through the paper to find the illustrated report promised on the front page and simultaneously keeping my eye on the kitchen door, fearful of being caught in the act. I mustn’t immerse myself entirely in these reports of the accident, I told myself, as I may not notice if someone comes into the kitchen and catches me at it.

      Egged on by Bernhard one might as well concede that there is an absurd and, by extension, perversely humorous side to Metinides’ work. The gathered crowds often have something in common with the people glimpsed in the background of photos of a fisherman who has had the good fortune to land a record-breaking marlin. In both circumstances spectating becomes a form of vicarious participation. As his fame increased so his presence must have served as an additional inducement to come and have a look – and maybe get photographed in the act of looking. (Occasionally he shows the victims on their own, in the solitude of death. The silence of these pictures – of a woman who killed herself, for example, because her estranged husband took their child away to live with him and his lover – is all the more poignant given the din and jostle that normally surrounds such scenes.) Metinides has said that he has ‘photographed everything except a spaceship or submarine collision’ but his pictures of upended buses often look like a meteorite has come crashing out of space and landed in Mexico City. And although his pictures are grimly matter-of-fact they often have an other-worldly quality about them. Partly this is because what is so shown is often so strange (a bus is winched out of a lake like a giant fish, a huge truck lands on the roof of a car); partly it is the result of how it is shown (he was one of the first photographers to use a flash in daylight). The combination lends the pictures an aura that is both filmic and religious.

      The films Metinides saw as a boy – gangster movies, especially – profoundly shaped his signature aesthetic, whereby a sequence of action is reduced to a single image. If the technology were available whole segments of action could be extrapolated and derived from these daylight noirs of Metinides. A shot of a shoot-out between cops and robbers in a supermarket reads like a script in super-condensed form. Another photo shows a conflagration at a gas station, started, apparently, by two young men who drove off without paying but with the hose still in their petrol tank. Glamorous as a movie star, a blonde woman is smashed by a car and becomes, in death, a broken – and eerily serene – mannequin. It seems possible that pictures like these provided part of the inspiration for the hectic, tragi-comic action of Amores Perros by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Often people who are witnesses to – or victims of – a calamity say that it was ‘like being in a movie’, and many of Metinides’ pictures look not so much like film stills as still films. Perhaps this is why, on occasion, they are reminiscent of images by Jeff Wall, who operates in exactly this idiom of artificially enhanced reality. The difference is that while Wall’s tableaux are resolutely enigmatic Metinides seeks, always, to elucidate. In this sense, it could be said, he is a reporter rather than an artist. As well as being the source of a peculiar kind of information about the world and its ways, his pictures also offer gory solace – in the form of knowledge. Maybe this is one of the reasons the crowds gaze at the photographer: in the hope that he can provide an answer as to why such terrible things happen. Within the limits of his chosen medium, Metinides does his best to oblige. In this sense, he is a storyteller.

      His stories often involve a bus. Whereas many people spend their lives waiting for buses, life, for Metinides, is an accident waiting to happen. Basically, the bus brings the two together with devastating effect. Anyone who has travelled in Mexico will be familiar with the way these buses speed and surge around curving mountain roads. The inkling that your chances of survival are as dependent on the image of the Virgin swaying from the rear-view