Leonard Correa worked for years as a crime scene investigator in Southern California, taking photographs of victims and the places where crimes befell them. He would turn, over time, to personal photography as a way to deal with his inability to forget the tragic events he was documenting. On one assignment, Correa found that his own cousin had been shot to death. His gripping photographs have now appeared widely in art exhibitions.

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
Genesis 6:11

You and the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles both had jobs involving those who died violently. How did those experiences affect you and Margolles?

Leonard Correa: As a former crime scene investigator, I witnessed the sheer and unimaginable brutality one human can inflict upon another. Many of the crime scenes left a lasting impression on my consciousness, and those ordinary streets and buildings I often had to keep passing became visual reminders of the traumatic event that took place there. The rest of the world moved on. I could not “unsee” and had to deal with these triggers.

The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has witnessed the results from acts of inhumanity tenfold. She worked as a forensic pathologist in México during the “drug wars.” Many of us carry the burden of these images of violence in silence. Margolles rejects that silence. She chooses to incorporate the biological remnants of the victims into her sculptures. Blood and tissue from dead bodies become an inescapable element of her art.

Margolles has a particular focus on the murders of women, is that right?

Yes, she’s titled one of these powerful works Lote Bravo. It is a series of earthen, adobe-like blocks made from the dirt from various locations surrounding Ciudad Juarez, places where hundreds of innocent women endured the horrors of rape and murder before being discarded by their captors like toys that no longer interested a child. These blocks may seem innocuous to the viewer, but, in context, they become a visual testimony to victims and crimes many have forgotten.

The blocks provide the viewer with a sense of the pain and suffering the earth has absorbed from the victims, like a mother embracing a dying child in her arms. Margolles eases Mother Earth's burden by sympathetically removing the soil from her arms to create these blocks so that the spirits of those taken can make an indelible mark on the consciousness of the viewer.

Besides Lote Bravo, what other works by Teresa Margolles speak to you as someone who also frequented crime scenes?

Her use of cloths infused with the blood of victims following the autopsy procedure makes Lemas another forceful series. At first glance, the random patterns may seem as intriguing as the Shroud of Turin. But as the viewer gets drawn in, the smell and the texture of the dried blood strikes the senses with the grim reality of a life lost to violence.

As an artist yourself, do you think these pieces by Teresa Margolles are meant simply to honor the unnamed dead?