Catherine Anyango Grünewald
Last Seen is a series of graphite drawings made with both direct and indirect reference to CCTV footage and police photography of the last known recorded image of a person before or at their disappearance or death. The words ‘last seen’ are often invoked, and carry with them a notion of hope – a person last seen may still be alive – while these images are one step beyond this, describing the ‘last scene’ of a person’s recorded life. I find a great tension between the fact that these images are in the public domain, while simultaneously being one of the most private and sad moments of a person’s existence.
This series of images records traumatic, violent events in an oblique, indistinct manner, drawing on the moment just before an already-past incident—“last seen”—rather than depicting the disaster site directly. Yet the treated documentary imagery is powerful enough to provoke. Her perspective is highly thought-provoking: How does she represent death? For me, the inspiration lies in how to approach my own subject matter: how to transform what I want to convey into images, which fragment to capture, and how to handle existing visuals. In this respect, she tried to use graphite and the act of drawing to create a surface which alludes physically and conceptually to the acts that have taken place.
For example, in Burnt Bed—referencing the 1988 killing of Patricia Miller by James Barnes, who tied her to a bed and set it ablaze—the pencil is scored repeatedly across the paper, literally distressing its surface until it appears charred.