Suicide in Union Square (UPDATED)
Should I have been arrested for taking this picture?
This is the first of a series of photos I took following a suicide on Union Square, on Broadway just south of the Virgin Records store. It was an incredibly poignant scene--a life reduced to a makeshift memorial that it would itself soon be washed away.
But that's not how a police officer saw it. He ordered me to stop taking pictures, growing so adamant and vociferous that I defused the situation only by calmly inviting him to arrest me.
One of the officer's statements particularly stands out: he said that I had to stop because he--the officer--was going to see his grandchildren later today. Even here, it seems, an appeal to the children seemed to be a powerful argument--and no doubt for the officer it was.
The standoff spoke volumes about our relation to death and personal identity. I started to take these photos for my Blingdom of God and Uncivil Society blogs as a meditation on life, death and memory--this was a truly moving scene, a life of despair marked by detritus and blood on the sidewalk, and then washed away.
The officer's response reflects our all too human desire not to acknowledge the reality of death in daily life. This was a street, a sidewalk, a place where people pass through as they live their daily lives--we should not remember death here; we should not memorialize the willful end of one's own existence; we should not expose our children to all that this scene may imply--not least of all lest they, mimetic as they are, begin to see despair and death as viable options.
Which is more respectful to the memory of the person lost here in so many ways? To remember & reflect or to wash it away?
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