Alfonso Fonseca Captures Echoes of Past Crimes
© Alfonso Fonseca
Written by Andy Dion
You’re walking through town to pick up some groceries, under a bridge and past a parking lot that’s always full. Twenty years ago, the body of a murder victim lay decomposing in a car for a full month before being discovered by police. You stride past that very spot on a daily basis, yet you have never seen a trace of that vile event.
Enter It Could Have Happened Here by Alfonso Fonseca.
© Alfonso Fonseca
The title elicits the response, “if it could have been here, then it could have been there as well.” The tentative language of the title somehow emphasizes a key tenet of the series: it happened. It could have happened here, it could have happened there, but it happened nonetheless.
It Could Have Happened Here is an exercise in time-bending that brings the past, events so far faded into obscurity — sometimes necessarily so — into infinitum. The Phoenix-based artist researches crimes in his area, unearthing archival photographs to re-document them. When Fonseca revisits sites of crimes from the 80’s, he captures their banality. After introducing red paint, rippings of yellow paper, and handwritten text to these seemingly nondescript images, it becomes vaguely apparent that these settings and people carry cursed burdens of trauma. In one photo of an otherwise normal looking parking garage, Fonseca draws a blood red, crime scene-esque circle in between two modern cars. An arrow points to the circle with a description reading, “Exact spot of the explosion.” The history of this coordinate cannot be ignored. The past and present become entangled thanks to Fonseca’s visual commentary.
© Alfonso Fonseca
Fonseca’s approach to this project is varied, in that the images feel both surgical, like crime scene and newspaper photography, yet immediate and wild. His use of flash makes these liminal rooms, trash heaps, and defiled spaces feel unoccupied, while also being seen and accounted for. One such photo of a crime scene in the desert shows a side view of a car with blue and red placeholders for the dearly departed. This space, that would otherwise be a vast expanse of dust and bushes is re-contextualized with brightly colored vestiges. Their presence is the center of a universe in Fonseca’s world, forever altering our own. Fonseca blurs the lines on which images are bona fide crime scene archives, and which are his revisitations. Some archival footage feels obscured and otherworldly, with otherwise common conventions like newsprint being cropped to the point where it feels slightly off, as if voices from the past vibrate through worn-away prints of fading truth.
© Alfonso Fonseca
The collection rarely shows actual violence — mostly just the aftermath. What pervades throughout It Could Have Happened Here is the color red — blood red. Fonseca pencils notes about crimes in red in his hurried off, private investigator fashion. Murderers are surrounded in a red aura or cut straight out from the page and replaced with redness, occupying what was originally their space. Red marks specific locations of crimes committed, forever sullying the spot. These vermilion spectres are reminders of blood shed not too long ago, but long enough to forget.
© Alfonso Fonseca
Through putting on the hat of an investigator and using the ingenuity of an all-seeing ghost, Fonseca immortalizes reminders of the past — moments that will haunt us forever.
