The Photographer As Detective

My favorite musician David Byrne retells an amazing story about my favorite contemporary artist, Vik Muniz:

A young man was dead and he and his motorcycle lay at the side of the road at the end of a short skid mark. Vik, like a character on CSI, came to some immediate conclusions that he proposed to the cop. The cop thought it may have been an accident, but Vik said, “No, look, the bits of his brain are exploding out, if he’d had an accident they would be caved in” …and then Vik announced, “He was shot, and the killer was a friend of his.” The cop was shocked at his apparent jump to such a conclusion, but Vik’s statements were all reasoned out. He noticed that the dead kid had accelerated on his motorcycle rapidly from a standstill; therefore, he had stopped to talk to this person who had then killed him. He’d been shot in the back while trying to speed off, and then the assassin had delivered the coup de graçe, sloppily, as some young assassins can’t bear to look when they comply with that part of their assignment.