beaters, wife poisoners, child molesters …’
‘Mr Click-clack-Kodak,’ Heath Hawkins confirmed. ‘Mutilations, torture, necrophilia, autopsies, bestiality, road accidents, work-site carnage, a good blaze
‘The naked shaking animal,’ Ashley said. ‘Killings, atrocities, butchery, gore. The shameful and menacing experiences that show humanity at its worst. You believed in the beginning that there was a psychic shield. But as more people died, and more friends, you learned there was not. Best-known quote, after your car was hit by a hand-detonated mine set off at a distance by guerrillas: “It was as if I had been to my own funeral. I kneweverything – who wrote, who called, who came, who didn’t.” Second most-famous: “I want to turmoil people. Take them out of that comfort zone,” a clear echo of McCullin’s, “I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people.” A child of privilege, your fascination with extreme violence is your attempt to know the world by knowing the worst it has to offer. Please state your current worldview in a way that would be suitable for a white-on-black, centre-leg pull-quote of fifty words or less.’
‘My grandmother used to have a saying that when hell was full up, the dead will walk the earth,’ Heath Hawkins said. ‘We’re seeing it now They are the dead. Out there. In here. Look at them.’
Heath Hawkins looks like one of the ruined beauties of the West Coast white jazz scene of the forties and fifties: Art Pepper, Stan Getz, Chet Baker after their best blowing days, even their junky jailbird days, were long behind them, and death was clearly on the horizon. He has greased-up, greying copper-bronze hair that falls forward in a scimitar shape when he is helling round getting images of suffering and ruination to stick to the film, and stone-washed vacant blue eyes. Tonight he’s wearing a tonic suit with narrow trousers and a single-breasted jacket, and a T-shirt that says ‘Fuct’ across the front in the lettering of the ‘Ford’ logo. He has a knotted saffron-coloured cord around his neck, and a small, pendant black velvet draw-string bag. As usual, his hands are taped with the same plastic tape he uses to protect the body parts of his camera. Visible on his fingers, and on his face and neck, are the open skin lesions that cover the rest of his body; they are caused by a parasitic protozoa picked up a decade or more ago, transmitted by a genus of blowfly in Salvador or Nicaragua or the Congo or the Lebanon or Guatemala or Biafra.
‘So,’ Hawkins says. ‘How we all enjoying this latest gruesical? A gas, or what? All it’s missing is a body. Still no smudges of the battered and broken, is there? I tell you, Norman, we got to get the fuck in there. Go team-handed. Smush up right in the guy’s face. Bang off some snaps. It behoves me. I mean, a couple ofhours after she’d croaked it, Monet was in there painting his old lady, getting down the blue and the yellow and the grey tonalities of death. And for sure he’s feeling no pain, old McGovern. Not no way is he feeling any pain, right. He’s pure, insensate vegetable matter. I enjoyed your piece by the way. Good going. But, listen. We’ve got to crash it, man. Do it. Go in with me. Run a raid on the factory of bad karma.’
Hawkins has become as habituated to hospitals as he once was to famines and foreign wars. His first portfolio after he had hung up his flak jacket, his shrapnel-holed olive drabs, came together over the months he spent lurking in the Casualty Department of a busy inner-city hospital, homing in on torn flesh, screaming faces, meaty wounds, following his subjects into emergency surgery, prowling the morgue. The hospital management had to ask him to leave in the end.
He kept taking pictures of his first wife through her slow death from cancer; the ravages of chemotherapy, the bifurcated scar of the mastectomy blown up into images of high-contrast, extreme graininess.
He met
‘Mr Click-clack-Kodak,’ Heath Hawkins confirmed. ‘Mutilations, torture, necrophilia, autopsies, bestiality, road accidents, work-site carnage, a good blaze
‘The naked shaking animal,’ Ashley said. ‘Killings, atrocities, butchery, gore. The shameful and menacing experiences that show humanity at its worst. You believed in the beginning that there was a psychic shield. But as more people died, and more friends, you learned there was not. Best-known quote, after your car was hit by a hand-detonated mine set off at a distance by guerrillas: “It was as if I had been to my own funeral. I kneweverything – who wrote, who called, who came, who didn’t.” Second most-famous: “I want to turmoil people. Take them out of that comfort zone,” a clear echo of McCullin’s, “I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people.” A child of privilege, your fascination with extreme violence is your attempt to know the world by knowing the worst it has to offer. Please state your current worldview in a way that would be suitable for a white-on-black, centre-leg pull-quote of fifty words or less.’
‘My grandmother used to have a saying that when hell was full up, the dead will walk the earth,’ Heath Hawkins said. ‘We’re seeing it now They are the dead. Out there. In here. Look at them.’
Heath Hawkins looks like one of the ruined beauties of the West Coast white jazz scene of the forties and fifties: Art Pepper, Stan Getz, Chet Baker after their best blowing days, even their junky jailbird days, were long behind them, and death was clearly on the horizon. He has greased-up, greying copper-bronze hair that falls forward in a scimitar shape when he is helling round getting images of suffering and ruination to stick to the film, and stone-washed vacant blue eyes. Tonight he’s wearing a tonic suit with narrow trousers and a single-breasted jacket, and a T-shirt that says ‘Fuct’ across the front in the lettering of the ‘Ford’ logo. He has a knotted saffron-coloured cord around his neck, and a small, pendant black velvet draw-string bag. As usual, his hands are taped with the same plastic tape he uses to protect the body parts of his camera. Visible on his fingers, and on his face and neck, are the open skin lesions that cover the rest of his body; they are caused by a parasitic protozoa picked up a decade or more ago, transmitted by a genus of blowfly in Salvador or Nicaragua or the Congo or the Lebanon or Guatemala or Biafra.
‘So,’ Hawkins says. ‘How we all enjoying this latest gruesical? A gas, or what? All it’s missing is a body. Still no smudges of the battered and broken, is there? I tell you, Norman, we got to get the fuck in there. Go team-handed. Smush up right in the guy’s face. Bang off some snaps. It behoves me. I mean, a couple ofhours after she’d croaked it, Monet was in there painting his old lady, getting down the blue and the yellow and the grey tonalities of death. And for sure he’s feeling no pain, old McGovern. Not no way is he feeling any pain, right. He’s pure, insensate vegetable matter. I enjoyed your piece by the way. Good going. But, listen. We’ve got to crash it, man. Do it. Go in with me. Run a raid on the factory of bad karma.’
Hawkins has become as habituated to hospitals as he once was to famines and foreign wars. His first portfolio after he had hung up his flak jacket, his shrapnel-holed olive drabs, came together over the months he spent lurking in the Casualty Department of a busy inner-city hospital, homing in on torn flesh, screaming faces, meaty wounds, following his subjects into emergency surgery, prowling the morgue. The hospital management had to ask him to leave in the end.
He kept taking pictures of his first wife through her slow death from cancer; the ravages of chemotherapy, the bifurcated scar of the mastectomy blown up into images of high-contrast, extreme graininess.
He met
Similar Books
