“The Most Beautiful Suicide” by Photographer Robert Wiles

“The Most Beautiful Suicide” by Photographer Robert Wiles, 1947, via The-InvisibleFriend on deviantART

On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ‘He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,’ … Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.

I frankly don’t know how well known the photo is, since it is more than 60 years old.

So how to think about this photo? I certainly don’t think it is beautiful or elegant, I think it just evokes emotions in you. Photography is not necessarily about beauty.

Perhaps you imagine you are the dead woman, the center of attention having her death invaded by a crowd of onlookers, like a bunch of scavengers whose lust is intensified by the glamourized violence against women that our culture loves, that even in death it is important to the viewer that a woman looks serene in a passive and graceful pose.

But obviously we all know it is not tabu to display a violated woman in a passive and serene pose, the tabu is about this one being dead and on a smashed car. The fact that the pose and the clothes are aesthetically pleasing by our standards is what turns it on its head and makes people look at it a second further and then contemplate, it’s like it somehow fools your cognitive devices and shields from your superficial consciousness what you can still see is there.

Imagine that you were there, you think something like “this is it, right there, a woman like any other, a human being like myself, but dead, by her own accord”. And then, what are we going to do about it? Nothing… we all just respond with vulnerability, all you can do is clear out the body, tow away the car and move on.

A screenwriter here in Rio once said that he’s always wanted to successfully capture the emotions of the gratuitous, violent loss of someone you love, in film, and that “El Secreto de sus Ojos” does it as well as he’s ever seen it. I absolutely agree, and that is just what we’re talking about here. To the “innocent bystander”, a body falling from the sky and smashing into a car is this: gratuitous, extreme, senseless violence of the kind that paralyzes a human being into shock.

In war zones, photographers have shot dead bodies before by the thousands, even the moment of someone’s death. Then, they were shooting history, because war is the justification for anything you want, it’s the opposite of civilization. In war, anything goes and is merely anecdotal, because we have the balancing act of cities, orderly communities, organized society and so on, and their margins are left to absorb all the death and destruction and absolve us of all guilt.

Ultimately, the ones that pay for the tabu are the actors, in this case, the suicide. What of the suicides, then? Tabu is good for marginalizing human population and absolving the hypocrites snuggly inside society. By forbidding a story from being told, you abandon the characters in it, leaving them to sink deeper into whatever hole they are in, offering no solace, no compassion and no empathy, instead retreating to the customary, guilty human condition.