It’s a suicide mission with no conceivable effect, only consequences; a political action for and by a constituency of two. It is the sort of fantasy that can emerge only when people are trapped like rats even while they know that there is an unreachable alternative out there somewhere. To go on the run is to chase the dragon of that vaguely envisioned other life, in full knowledge of the futility of the effort and the inevitability of the end. Since the formula stirs together three of the most combustible elements in American life--sex, speed, and ballistics--you simply have to accept that you will explode along the way.

Images by Christian Patterson from Redheaded Peckerwood. Left: House on Fire. Right: Ray of Light. Copyright and courtesy the photographer.

That is how Luc Sante introduces a new photo book by Christian Pattersom based on the killing spree that teenagers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate went on across the Great Plains in the winter of 1957 and ’58. Informed by past models embedded in popular imagination, including Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the couple, with their gun and their car and a deeply embedded ethos of ennui and distain in turn inspired Terence Malick’s film, Badlands (1973), as well as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974) and, according to Sante, Bruce Springstein’s 1982 issue, Nebraska (which includes Born to Run) and Sonic Youth’s album Goo (1990).

Patterson followed the killers’ trail, sleuthing out a visual montage of the places they stopped and their victims through documents and photographs he found in newspaper morgues, civic archives, and police evidence files together with his own photographs: banal objects, abandoned houses, apocalyptic landscapes of endless flatlands merging with the sky—images that combine to suggest the unsettling conditions that caused two people to wreak havoc and destroy those they targeted and themselves. The result is a disturbing yet beautiful visual narrative about a tragedy that has become embedded in the historical fabric of the Great Plains. It will likely take its place on the short shelf of narrative history classics originated by Michael Lesey with Wisconsin Death Trip (Pantheon 1973).

Christian Patterson will be signing copies of Redheaded Peckerwood (Mack 2011), with an essay by Luc Sante. Thursday, December 1^st from 6 to 8 pm at Dashwood Books. 33 Bond Street, between Bowery and Lafayette, NY, NY.

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