Mikita Brottman

I’ve got a collection of old crime scene pictures and I’m not sure where this one came from, but it’s one of my favorites. There are no dead bodies, and things look very domestic apart from the tilted cabinet and the blood spatter on the door. Whatever happened here was violent enough to knock over the heavy cabinet, yet it didn’t upset the table which is so neatly laid, the breakfast things untouched, the newspaper unread. There’s a seediness about the room – look at the damp stains on the ceiling, the lumpy wallpaper and bare light bulb – that makes the pretty table setting seem poignant, as if someone were trying to draw attention away from the hopelessness of everything else. Those pretty carnations and the white tablecloth suggest a facade of genteel domesticity, an illusion of decency that didn’t even hold up until breakfast time.