Pictures of an execution

BY DAVID BOWMAN | this is written for the handful of Americans who knew who Princess Diana was, but had nothing emotional invested in her -- the people who recognize the tragedy of her death, but don't take it as a personal loss. I am one of those Americans. Last month I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I'm hoping that a description of an exhibit that I saw there might prepare you for your own future viewing of the photos of the Princess of Wales as she lay dying in the back seat of her lover's Mercedes-Benz ("which was not as armored as first reported") -- images that may or may not show the woman blown backwards against the rear of the front seat, her head facing the Mercedes' back window while her hand touches the bloody leg of her companion, Dodi Fayed (as one wire service reports). Or the photos may show Diana's head slumped down (as another says), no facial features visible.

But if the photos do show her face, it's unlikely that she'll be looking into the camera. Her eyes will be closed, although her expression will not be peaceful. Her jaw will be clenched in a grimace, as witnesses have reported that the dying princess didn't stop groaning. None of us will see these photos this week, but probably by autumn's end they'll be shown. The first ones will be published in Germany. On our side of the big ditch, the National Enquirer will then print photos of Germans looking at the photographs of Diana dying. Next, the respectable daily newspapers (except the New York Times?) will publish photos of outraged Brits looking at the photos of Germans looking at the death shots. And so on. When the eventual photographs are published in Time or Newsweek, they will cease to be tabloid-style affronts against decency. They will be news. The only difference between these photos and the ones of Robert Kennedy as he lay dying of gunshot wounds in Los Angeles, is that the photographers themselves (as well as the ghost of Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee) may have contributed to the accident that resulted in Diana dying in the back seat of Dodi Fayed's Mercedes.

Their complicity may or may not make viewing Diana's death shots the moral equivalent of watching a snuff film (if such flicks exist) -- a point I want to leave dangling for a moment as I explain what I learned in the Museum of Modern Art. Imagine that you are visiting MoMA with me in the middle of August, 1997. We've come to see the Cindy Sherman exhibit of self-portraits done as fake Italian neo-realism film stills. Just across the lobby is another photo exhibit: Stuck in a dinky cubbyhole are huge portraits of prisoners that were made by Khmer Rouge photographers at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the years 1975 through 1979. The photographers' styles are uniform and simple. Each portrait is a chest-to-head shot of a frowning prisoner standing before a simple white background. Most have numbers pinned to their chests. Almost all stand with their hands behind their backs. They are not posed this way because they're in deep thought -- their wrists are bound. A third of the subjects show marks of being beaten. And after each sitting was finished, each subject was forced to dig his or her grave before being either shot or fatally beaten. These last photos are the only remnants of those Cambodians' lives. Now I won't speculate on how long you will or should look at these pictures, but when I first saw them I spent maybe 15 seconds taking in the totality of the whole god-awful room, and then I turned away.

It seemed moral pornography to hang those pictures as if they were just another Cindy Sherman exhibition. The art in those photos was unintentional. Yet I forgot the Sherman photos the moment I hit the street, while I obsessed about those pictures of Cambodians for days. I admit that I'm a man with apocalyptic tendencies, but then I am a novelist after all. In 1992, I probably spent six months rewriting a single chapter in my first novel, "Let the Dog Drive," that was nothing but an extended scene of violence. I can be a bloodthirsty reader as well. Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," that ultra-violent narration concerning 19th-century scalp hunters run amok in Mexico, heads the list of my most revered books. So it seems logical (doesn't it? I hope!) that there was sublime (as in "terrible beauty") information available in those Cambodian photographs that I couldn't ignore.

It came to me that any viewer of the portraits needed to go through some kind of purification ceremony before they saw the drained, sad face of female prisoner 241. Or the pistol-whipped, pissed-off young man pinned with the number 55. I know about prisoners 241 and 55 because I bought a book at MoMA called "The Killing Fields" (an "art book" published by Twin Palms Publishers) that contained reprints of the entire exhibit. I took this book to an Episcopalian church and looked at the pictures while sitting in the pews. It's not important to report the details of the ritual I created, but in the end the pain and dark grace I saw in those photos seemed to lead to nothing but contemplation of bottomless pain and even darker grace. In the end, what I saw educated me as a writer, even though what I saw won't make my prose any richer.

Now the photos of Princess Diana slumped beside Dodi Fayed have nothing to do historically or politically with the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. And the noisy energy in those smashed Mercedes portraits will be different from the silent horror of the Cambodian ones. But I bet the sheer impact of seeing the unseeable will be very similar, if not the same.

On the Saturday night when I heard about Diana's death by paparazzi, my first and immediate thought was, "I have to see those photos." After all, it was only three weeks ago that I had done my Cambodian ceremony. By Tuesday, I wanted to write a piece that defended the importance of the Princess Di death shots. But then I looked at "The Killing Fields" book again -- this time in my office, not a church. Seeing the photos a second time made me consider retracting my original premise. I wasn't sure the Mercedes death photos were going to show me anything I hadn't already seen in the prison portraits of the Cambodians.

But then, Diana's death is a singular tragedy, not an apocalypse. Surely there will be unique dark information in them. Although the paparazzi who shot them bear responsibility for her death, they weren't "snuff photographers" who set out to kill her and then make millions off portraying her dying. This gives any viewer of her death photos a moral escape hatch, doesn't it?

Maybe not. Imagine someone you know -- preferably a friend -- who's a little on the PC/self-righteous side. Hear them saying, "I'll never look at those photos! And anyone who does -- even if they've never cared about paparazzi shots before -- is just as guilty as any fervent German reader of "Bild Zeitung."

Consider your friend's words. Then if you don't buy that argument, go ahead and look at the photos. But look with deliberation. Gather any historical and emotional information you may need. Then try to at least summon up respect for the traffic god of Pont de L'Alma and the tunnels under the Eiffel Tower, even if reverence for the driver and passengers who died there escape you.

However, if your friend's righteous statement sounds valid, then understand that you are setting yourself up for karmic repercussions that your intellect will not save you from if you look at the pictures when they are printed in Time and Newsweek. What you should do is deliberately -- without being smug -- turn the page.

That said, knowing the way the world works, the Museum of Modern Art will declare the photos to be "art" before the century is over and hang them across the lobby from an exhibit of Cindy Sherman's more recent "autopsy" work. On the day the show opens, let's go to MoMA together. Walk up to Di's room and give her exhibit a quick glance. Then split. Although these photographs will contain much information about death and dying, I doubt what we learn will be of any comfort to us. If you are a writer, you may want to linger longer and risk being a moral paparazzi of sorts -- a fate that will only be worth it if the experience gets you at least one killer paragraph.

David Bowman is the author of "Let the Dog Drive" and the forthcoming novel "Bunny Modern."
Sept. 8, 1997

Will you look? Contemplate it in Table Talk.

Diana's unquiet death A complete list of articles from Salon's package on the death of Princess Diana