macabre in its deceptiveness

There is a famous photograph—one that is ubiquitous on some of the more grotesque regions of the internet—of a young girl wrapped in the collapsed hood of a car. The photograph purports to be of the woman instants after she had committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building. The photo was widely circulated in the early 1960s, and made its photographer, Earl Livish, a brief celebrity in the world of photography.

The image, when you first see it, is macabre in its deceptiveness. Given the height from which she had fallen, our instincts tell us that there is no way that the woman should look like she does; instead of broken, deformed, bleeding, the woman instead may as well be sleeping peacefully, her legs crossed at the shin as if in repose, her chin arched up as if dreaming. In the background of the photo, over the horizon of the car hood, one can see the tops of onlooker’s heads, some turned away, and others turned to view the horror directly. When the image appears on the internet, whether on a page or circulated in a viral forward, there is usually a block of text accompanying it, proving once and for all that people would rather have a gruesome story than a true one, the vague and exploitative text block has become the standard narrative.

But, as often happens, the truth is much more interesting. What it true is that the photographer was named Earl Livish, and he indeed did come by a modicum of fame as a result of the photograph, but the story of the girl, the girl’s name, and even the location of the death, are all completely and utterly wrong. Conveniently wrong.

-from the new book