A girl sits on a toilet, naked, with blood running from her nose down her chest. There’s a speculum in her vagina. She has a black eye. Her name’s Meg McCarville, and she recently got her BFA from UIC. She staged this photo and a couple hundred similar ones–including some where she’s got a swastika painted on her chest in blood–and had a friend shoot them with a digital camera as part of her final project. They’re stylized and campy–some might even say glamorous. “We didn’t really want them to look realistic. I mean, we got the recipe for the blood off the Internet,” says McCarville.
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Actually the prints were made from a CD of digital images McCarville took to a Wal-Mart in Elk Grove Village in April. It’s cheap, fast, and right down the street from her mom’s house, where McCarville stays a couple times a week. Though she says she’d previously asked if Wal-Mart would develop photos involving nudity and an employee told her no, she brought in the disc anyway. They’d made prints of her bruised and bloody before. Plus, she says, “they got a new machine where you just put in a CD and it seemed like a person wouldn’t see anything, that your photos would just print out right away.”
McCarville got there around 8:30. The clerk started looking for her pictures but couldn’t find them. This is so weird, said the clerk. They were just sitting right here. I have no idea where they went. But there’s a number at the bottom of your receipt–maybe we filed it under that code. Do you have it?
Whose are these? asked the cop. What are these?
I do it just for the camera, said McCarville.
Hold on a second, he said, and got on the radio.
A couple days later she went to the police department. “An officer came out with the photos in an evidence bag, and he made me sign a form that said I was involved in a ‘suspicious incident,’” she says. (According to Elk Grove Village police sergeant Mike Kirkpatrick, the form she signed was just a property inventory report.)
