She has a lovely face. She is 22, and comes from Colombia. It is not surprising that the photographer, Jason P Howe, is falling in love with her. I don’t know the sequence of events for sure, but the visual evidence suggests he has caught the tenderness between them, just as they are lost in delight at each other.

But there is another possibility. He is using it to wrestle with a terrible discovery. She is a right wing assassin, who kills in cold blood, for money.

The title comes from Act 1, Scene 7 of Macbeth, which opens thus:

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.”

The young woman, Marylin, will eventually be murdered, stoned by her own side and then shot.

Howe tells his story in The Independent.

He has taken many fine photographs, but this one worries me more than most.

A Metafilter moment. Most of the comments are down on his writing style, but I figure he is a photographer who writes like I take snaps. He is struggling with, or at least revealing, his own sad voyeurism.

The ethics are more complex – he is a reporter, and they do strange things with disclosure, particularly if you are the sort of journalist who writes this -

“I had been in Colombia for a few months to learn how to become a photojournalist. Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.”

Before that, he “survived 10 years working in photographic retail. During these years he expanded his technical knowledge and made his first visits to Latin America”.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under ideas and society, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.