Part of my “point,” FWIW, is that there’s always been an audience for this sort of thing. It’s not something new. You can find it in Petronius Arbiter, for crying out loud. Further to some of the points raised below, anyone who’s read Petronius, or sixteenth-century travelogues, or Poe, or Shelley, et al, knows that special effects are not the same as the real thing. The nineteenth century gothic novelists didn’t go into graphic detail because their audience had likely witnessed human gore. It’s enough to say, “He was trampled by a wayward team.” Modern audiences have not seen such things, so we’re treated to silicone and plaster facsimiles in slasher films and torture porn. And then you see Elizabeth Short, real human being, and the physical reality of humans made of meat slaps you in the face with worldview-shattering consequences, as DoctorJay intimates. (I understand that the young people today no longer see films like Signal 30 in Driver’s Ed classes. Is this true?)

It seems to me that there are two, possibly competing, sociological implications of images like this. One is, as Gwen points out, the consumption of human tragedy and suffering. The other is the dehumanized, technological separation of modern humans from tragedy and suffering, where first-world, bourgeois humans can go their whole lives without witnessing a living human being reduced to meat, an experience that most people in the past and many in the present never have had the privilege to enjoy.

I’m not saying that this exhibit isn’t disturbing, but I am saying that it may be disturbing because of our current mores. And from what I can tell, those mores are under pretty serious attack. For example, I saw the Magruder film a bunch of times growing up, but until the movie JFK, had never seen the horrific part. Now we see it all the time. How many slasher films are now available at Blockbuster? and torture films on the web? A single night of television can net you visions of two or three rendered human bodies. I was involved in the internet early on as a developer and one of the first very popular sites was one that had thousands of gruesome images – I don’t think they were ever collected in one place before that. That site has only grown in size and popularity over the last 16 years and spawned many more like it. All those images are of real people, too.

I think this raises a bunch of questions. Is this just natural animal curiosity or something else? Do humans always get a charge out of seeing this stuff, even when it’s not prohibited generally? Or does prohibiting it for the most part, give it more power? Does being curious about it mean that we have less sympathy about what the person went through? Or can we look at it and see it in some other way?

I have no idea about any of it, nor do I really want to know. The older I get, the less I’m able to handle watching real violence or its aftereffects. I happened on an “art” book that ostensibly looked at the Black Dahlia murder in a new light. I was literally sick for days after seeing those images.

If anything this phrase describes USA as a nation. In the early days the whole wealth of USA was build on slavery. In the modern world it is build on continuous warfare and exploitation of weaker nations. Like Iraq, let us not kid ourselves. USA, like the savage entity it is, attacked it because it wants to capitalise [read: steal] the oil resources of that country.

I remember seeing one of the photos of Short in a library book about Hollywood sandals back in the late 80′s and being fascinated. Combined with films of the aftermath of car crashes shown in driver’s ed it reinforced my switch from Catholicism to Athieism. While the people in the pictures had once lived, and they obviously suffered horrible deaths, it was hard for me to believe in a human soul and afterlife when seeing bodies that had been reduced to meat.

In grad school I had a visiting speaker who had collected images of lynchings from the south in the 1920s. Public Enemy had used one of the pictures as an album cover for the “Hazy Shade of Criminal” EP. There would be the body of a dead black male hanging from a tree with crowds of white people standing around smiling and pointing. These pictures would be copied and shared among the community in a sick ritual of dehumanization.

Where does this show stand in the context of our history of pictures of other’s suffering? Is it voyeurism? Fascination with criminal acts? Is there something wrong with a public that lines up to see a show like this? What is the context of the LAPD using this show to lionize their work? Or maybe I should just re-read my copy of Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others”.

It was doubly disturbing considering I was looking up a character from a game my younger cousins play.

So much for “Safe Search.”

Just kidding.

This reminds me of the expression “the purpose of locks is to keep honest people honest.” The barrier to looking at the crime scene photos might have been tiny before, and anyone could have found them. But as long as there was some barrier, folks who had any sort of qualms about seeking them out were much, much less likely to do so. I bet a lot of people would willingly gawk at these photos when they were put on display in a publicly sanctioned way, but would think better of it if they actually had to go to the effort of finding them themselves.

So nothing was accomplished by showing them in this exhibit, since anyone who, for whatever reason, wants to see them, already has.