I can’t stop looking at this photo.
There’s something painterly about it, this snap taken by an enterprising – if intrusive – photojournalist who created a special rig just for the one-off prison van window shot he wanted.
Granted, it’s an image taken from a woman who’s had a lot already taken from her, while the presumption of innocence still stands. It’s been taken without her consent. To her shock and revulsion, in fact.
You can tell because it’s the first in a series of shots that goes on to show Erin Patterson startled by the flash and recoiling. She would never again show her face to that window; each time her van arrived after that she would hide her face.
So I’m not even sure I should look.
But I do look, again and again. Because I am a psychotherapist, trained in phenomenology, the study of human experience.
From my teachers I have inherited ways to collect patterns of humanity, that help me guess at hearts and minds for a living.
Or more importantly, that help me to help my patients to guess themselves, and those close to them.
We have all been guessing the heart and mind of Erin Patterson for a while now. And this picture captures something of why, beyond mycology, we have gathered in the town square in such great numbers.
In recent weeks I have seen Erin Patterson everywhere.
Not just on the front page or above the scrolling newsbars, but in the supermarket, in the food court, at school drop off. She looks like so many people, so ordinary. And yet she did something so extraordinary the world showed up to the trial.
Well, yes it was an extraordinary act. But the feelings we might imagine behind it, although a clear motive was never proven, are very ordinary indeed.
We all live with hate as the ordinary push to the pull of love. Separation from the person we had kids with, and then life with ex-in-laws, all has to be managed. Many of us will wish they could poison the ex or the outlaws that spawned them.
But most of us leave it at a wish.
What was she thinking? How can we ever know? Does this photo give anything away?
Maybe. I think there is something deeply stirring about the unguarded look on a face needing so much guarding at this uniquely weird and exposed time in her life.
Something about the humanity in that stare.
Could Erin Patterson have been wondering about her life as her van moved along? Wondering if it had been worth it, whatever choices she made that led her there?
Could she have been lost in legal strategy?
Or was she just wondering what she would be given to eat next?
Or even just blanking out from it all?
Millions of words have been written about her, about her character, her alleged actions we no longer have to call alleged; about her weirdness, and also her normalness; about her badness and perhaps even her goodness.
If Erin Patterson had sat for an Archibald artist for several days, I can’t imagine a portrait capturing as much as this split second grab through a Perspex window.
It’s a window to a private moment for the most public figure of the moment. But it’s also a mirror, like every good portrait. Are those really the eyes of a murderer? They draw me in. They make me curious. They make me care.
That face in repose could be anyone’s, from any time. She could be in the Tate or the Uffizi, on the wall or in the crowd.
Of course it is just a split second grab. In the next frames Erin Patterson erupts in reaction; she looks so wild as she recoils from the sudden light. Wild like a killer, even. The prison van window thus frames something we the mob in the town square expected.
But in this first shot, she could be anyone, anywhere. And that’s less expected.
And so compelling.
#psychiatrying
Photo credit: Martin Keep – for the story of the capture of the shot:
My Doctor's Handwriting 