It Goes On

Miami has always been a mix of the beautiful and the sinister. From the time that Al Capone lived on a Palm Island mansion to the day of February 15th, 1933 when Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt while he gave a speech at Bayfront Park in Downtown Miami. These two sides of Miami were never clearer than from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Ten thousand prisoners from Cuba would arrive on April 1980, many of them murderers, combining that with a sudden mass inflow of Columbian cocaine and you have a mixture of power and money that left blood in its wake.

Every year starting in 1979, murders in Miami set a record. Three hundred and forty-nine in 1979, five hundred and sixty nine in 1980, six hundred and twenty one in 1981. Fifty percent were drug-related; twenty-five percent died from machine gun fire and fifteen were from public executions. The Dade County Medical Examiner's Office had to rent a refrigerated trailer from Burger King to handle the overflow of corpses on its hands.

My images attempt to convey this time period by looking at the scenes of the crime now. What during that time period made a life less precious? How could people murder so easily and what has changed that mindset from then to today? As I began researching I began to realize that I've passed these scenes of crimes many times before and never early knew the history that they contained. The very place photographed may have been covered in blood and bullet shells twenty years ago and now people stroll by unknowingly as if there was no past.