Discussions of Angela Strassheim's photographs, depicting everything from her
Midwestern family to actual human hearts,
have tirelessly focused on her training as a forensic photographer. And
indeed, before attending Yale University's MFA program,
Strassheim photographed crime scenes and autopsies, a fact that many
have handily (and a little inelegantly) linked to her scalpel-like,
acerbic, and, yes, sometimes anemic images of her conservative
born-again siblings and parents. But of course those photographs and
other previous works are free from the literal blood and death, the
murders and suicides she was once paid to document.

Now, however, for her new "Evidence" series, Strassheim has taken up a tool of her former trade, BlueStar,
a chemical reagent used during forensic investigations to detect blood,
exposing DNA traces through chemiluminescence. The ensuing black and
white images, which Strassheim made by spraying a mist over the walls of
houses where domestic murders had occurred, are, oddly enough, not
grotesque in the least. They are instead insidiously haunting and
poetic. This is no Weegee photograph of a corpse splayed on the ground
in a pool of blood. This is the pulsating, subtle feeling of intrigue
that emanates from a place you know to be steeped in some horrible
history. More disturbing perhaps in the "Evidence" body of work are
Strassheim's color photographs of the exteriors of homes in which
familial violence broke out, concisely titled as these images are with
the murder weapon used on the former inhabitant or inhabitants.

With "Evidence" currently on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, as a part of its "New Pictures" series, through October 9, the artist spoke to ARTINFO
about locating residences with blood on the walls and how she made
sure that when she knocked on the door, no one would be surprised to
learn what had once transpired in their home.

View Slideshow: Finding Art in Murder's Traces: A Q&A With "Memorial" Photographer Angela Strassheim

Can you tell me about your decision to portray violent crimes in these pictures, which are formally more lyrical than gruesome?

All of my work comes from my life experience and there are points where I
just live my life and then try to grapple with what that time meant to
me, after the fact. I worked in forensic photography for about six and a
half years and I had to use BlueStar for a job, maybe once a year, once
every two years. I would have to go to a scene that had been cleaned up
and then much later it was brought to light that maybe a body had been
there. We would spray, and I would take photographic evidence to show
that this is where the DNA samples were taken and then the photographs
were used in court alongside the DNA analysis. Before DNA, photographs
themselves were the evidence that a crime had been committed — whether
it happened at that site or the body was taken to that site. They were
the evidence that there was blood actually physically present at a
particular location. So all of that was always in the back of my mind.
And then, when I was in grad school I heard about this horrific suicide
that happened at the Duncan Hotel in New Haven. I photographed that for
one of my critiques and the results were amazing — the only problem was
that I was using 35 mm and 3200 speed color film and all the images were
extremely grainy and all the areas that were lit with the substance
were blue, blue-green, which in a photograph just looks like blue goo,
it looks like really goofy Hollywood, like Halloween effects or
something. That didn't work for me but I got a lot of positive feedback —
no one had seen anything like this in terms of art before so I knew at
some point I would create this body of work.

How did you then return to the project after grad school?

There were a couple of incidents in 2007 and 2008. There was this murder
that was somehow close to me; it was in an apartment that I knew very
well, from my past. And so I waited and waited. I waited a year and a
half to actually see this place. I bought all the stuff I needed and
really was trying to work up the guts to go. I was like, "I really don't
want to do this project but I have to do this project; I have to be the
one to do this project." Anything that's been written about me is just,
"Oh she was a crime scene photographer, forensic photographer," but
none of my work really shows that. People try to look at all of my
family work and say that there's a forensic eye but there still needed
to be something that came from me, a body of work that dealt with
forensic photography. I showed a lot of pictures in grad school that
included a lot of blood and guts. Even though that's something that I
can handle, it's not something that the public can handle. You can't get
very far with shock value. That was a big part of me being in school,
realizing, "Well, this is my life; this is what I look at. How do I make
this into something beautiful? How do I transform this into something
that can still be talked about, approached in a way that everyone can
enter into this world?" I was able to do that with family, but for me,
doing this new project was a way to talk about this really heavy subject
matter — domestic violence or murder/suicide that deals with familial
homicide — so that it presents itself as a beautiful image. I see them
as these sort of memorials to people who are heroes, who really fought
for their will to live, and even though they didn't live, there's like a
light that's left behind, this glow, as opposed to a stain. The
evidence that there's a new family living in the spaces shows that time
passes, people move on and something new can come into a tainted place.
I'm trying to bring something positive to this negative memory in a way.
It took me a long time to figure out how to make this work, that it had
to be black and white. It was the only way for the stain to really
become light.

The way that you've titled the photographs of the houses — listing
the murder weapon — is very different than, for instance, Deborah
Lester's method of titling her images of crime scenes in New Orleans, as
she actually includes the names of the victims. Why title the images of
the exteriors in the way you did?

It goes back to when I was a child walking to my bus stop every day past
a house where there was a murder/suicide, in the home of an older
couple. They didn't have kids so they weren't people that we knew; they
were always a bit of a mystery to us. When we heard the news of what
happened there, all we got was what was written in the newspaper, so
walking past this house every day you could only try to imagine how that
would play out. Being someone who had never seen a crime scene before,
your imagination... It's different than somebody who does know violence
or who has seen something like that. The interiors are just numbered, in
the order that I photographed them. But the reason that I haven't given
out names of the victims in either case is because I wanted to protect
the people who live in those houses now, who have tried to move on and
tried to bring something positive to the homes. I want to protect them
from people just randomly driving by and gawking at them. They went out
of their way to really trust me and give me permission to photograph.
Also, I just want to point out that there is no relationship or
correlation between the exteriors and interiors. All of the exteriors
are made from the street, which is public property. The exteriors are
the homes that I did not get into. There's no overlap.

Why these domestic, familial murders? What made you narrow down the project in that way?

Two reasons, one was that at first I was open to anything, I just needed
walls that had blood on them and I knew I wanted them to be authentic. I
was researching everything and then the first four or five that I got
access to were all family-related. At the same time, this was 2008 when I
started the research and I started photographing in 2009. This was when
the huge stock market crash happened — Madoff, and the banks,
everything, people losing their jobs — and there was a huge, huge rise
in violent crime in the two and a half years after that happened.
Everything was very current; this event propelled an increase in crimes
against family. A lot of it really deals with desperation, despair,
rage, and a lot of it has to do with men not being able to care for
their families anymore so they take the family out, they take themselves
out. It's either that, or it's someone cheated on the other person, or
there's a divorce that didn't go well, someone had a key, someone broke
and entered as an ex-husband. But the percentage has been, I can't
really say the statistics right off of my head, but the percentage of
women killing men and men killing women is not comparable at all. There
can be like three women in a year to like 4,000 men — it's that different.

How did your actual search process work — did you look through newspaper archives?

I did Internet searches. But there were some for which I would have to
go to libraries and go through old microfiche newspapers. I also would
go to the town court and get arrest records; I tried to get the public
arrest records to get even more details about which room of the house,
where it took place, what exact weapon was used, and sometimes it was
vague, sometimes it was very specific. And then, in Minnesota, at the
end of every year there is a rundown of all family-related crimes where
someone died, and that gave me enough to go on to do further research.
And California's really easy. Chicago's nearly impossible; I don't know
why, but it's really, really impossible to try to even search for
murders that happened in Chicago — and you know they happen all the time
there, but they're really hard to get any information on. Boston is
really easy, New York was so so. The problem in New York was that I
couldn't really deal with doormen. You can't just walk into an apartment
building and start going down the hallway and knock on somebody's door
because you're trapped and then they're trapped. I went to places where I
could go up to the door.

But you went all over.

All over the country, it started out with a road trip through the south,
which didn't work out so well. I realized very quickly that I needed
more time and locations and to be able to keep going back several times
to do the research before I would just knock on a door. So I ended up
spending an entire summer in L.A. and from L.A. I was able to go all
over California. In one day I would drive an hour and a half, two and a
half hours, and go to three or four homes, and then a week later I would
do the same route again, collecting information. And then maybe on the
third time I would knock on a door. It would depend on how it went
talking to neighbors. Sometimes houses were on the market and I would
have to wait for someone to buy it and move in and then I would talk to
the neighbors. There was only one place that I went to, only one, where
somebody didn't know that there had been a murder there, and I just
changed the subject with her completely and left. I didn't pursue it
because it didn't feel right to me. I get really upset when press
releases and other stuff, like the article in Wired, talk about my
telling these shocked people that there has been a murder in their home,
like me being the bearer of bad news, which is so untrue, so untrue.

I'm interested in how you frame the two kinds of pictures. I wonder
if, going in, you had any parameters as to what would be excluded from
or included in the frame.

When I was making the black and white pictures I had a pretty good idea
of where I would find evidence. Then I'm looking at the wall itself and
I'm looking at the architecture of the space. It was important to tell
the story of the space and not have it just be the close-up of the wall.
Only a couple of the images are close ups, like a more forensic
snapshot. They are, in a lot of ways, poetic — like the ones of the
fingers that are sliding off the wall or with the open door in the
background. Some of the other ones that are bigger have a more
architectural feel to them. I would set up two cameras, typically I
would start the exposure before it was too dark in the room, so right
after sunset, and there was still a lingering light and I would set up
the cameras and I would take one exposure and then I would continue the
exposure after it was dark and then I would spray. I would spay on one
side of the room and the stuff is really sensitive — I would look behind
me and just that mist fills the room, and if there's something on the
other side you see it as well.

What about the outdoor ones?

The color images, I didn't start making them until about halfway through
the road trip because it's so much work just getting to the house that I
was so frustrated if I didn't get in or was too terrified to knock on
the door. I eventually was just like, "I need evidence that I've
actually been to this house." So I started photographing the houses.
That would usually be the first photograph I would make. I would drive
up, figure out where it was, and take a picture from the street. They
were meant to just be point and shoot, small format, quick snapshots of
the exteriors, and I didn't know if I would ever use them or how I would
use them. I decided to use them after the project was finished.

To distinguish between the houses that you went into and the houses that you didn't?

That and the exteriors also show the different neighborhoods. They are
what we see when we hear something like this happened. We don't see
anything more than that. They're like these big mystery boxes that are
totally unattainable to us. We get a story but we can never get more than
the story.