Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait courtesy Diana Matar 

CS You grew up in Santa Clara County in California, a wealthy area of great beauty and, more recently, home to Silicon Valley. Yet as a photographer, you have ventured into places far from the protected life that I imagine – maybe incorrectly – you had growing up. Where did your curiosity, empathy and, perhaps, sense of responsibility come from?

DM When I was very young, Santa Clara was mainly walnut orchards and apricot trees before it became an area for engineering. It was diverse, not just in ethnicities, but also in what people did, because it wasn’t a rich place. It changed slowly, and then very quickly, after the first dot-com boom in the 1990s. I grew up in a family concerned about others. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a part of the world that still had the remnants of the 1960s and that kind of political engagement. I also grew up in a church, and churches weren’t what they are now. They were giving sanctuary to Central American refugees, they were working for Angela Davis and serving civil rights movements. That background gave me the ability to go out and feel safe and strong.

CS The words you add to your images of your project Evidence reveal a great sensitivity for spaces. You write that a house belongs to a specific man, for example, even though his wife has lived there without him for 20 years. You convey a whole story of loss, love, pain and resilience with a handful of words. Do your pictures bring those words to the surface for you, or are they present in the actual situation?

DM I believe most creativity comes from the gut. A lot of the words in Evidence came from my diaries and only later did I put the words together with the images. In that world, the absent one becomes much more present than the present one. If it had been the mother who had been taken, maybe it wouldn’t have been a man’s house, it would have been a woman’s house, because of that sense of the one who is no longer there. Whatever medium is being used at that moment is translating whatever is inside: it is very instinctual.

CS You are also married to someone with his own tragic sense of absence. Have you absorbed some of that sense of loss?

DM I have definitely absorbed from Hisham and his family the knowledge of what certain kinds of absences, of extrajudicial absences, place upon a family. The Libyan phrase for putting someone in jail is, “putting them behind the sun.” Putting them behind the sun doesn’t just affect the person who is in prison: the whole family is in darkness.

CS Photography is a medium usually tied to a tiny moment in time, but in your series My America, which portrays places where people were shot dead by the police, you liberate your medium from capturing the event that occurred in that split second by fixing your gaze only on the site itself. Most of those places are quiet, empty and still. Is that visual silence a form of mourning?

DM Primarily, it is a form of understanding something that cannot be understood. It’s a form of the human desire to make sense of something that should never make sense. It shouldn’t make sense and should not make sense! The act of pointing a camera or a paintbrush or words toward things that cannot be understood has been around for a long time. Attempts to eke out from the soil, from the space, answer with some kind of understanding. When I was making  Evidence, and again, to a lesser degree, when I was working on My America, I was purposely creating the work in a way that you would look at the pictures and say, something’s wrong here. There’s a sense of, “What happened here?” That changed a bit with My America, because what I kept seeing was the banality of the places; how these instances of deaths through interactions with police officers and law enforcement officers were just happening everywhere and anywhere. I wanted that to come through in the images.

CS How do you spend your time at the site?

DM I get out, I walk around. I’m very conscious of why I’m there. Often, I look at news videos in the car just before I get out. Part of that is to find the exact site, but also to prime myself. You’re in a car, coming from a long distance – you can get into autopilot. I wanted to create something almost like a ritual, being very conscious when I got out of the car of what happened at the site, why it happened, and who it happened to. At those sites, I have this kind of sixth or seventh sense that enables me to be open, to be porous, sensitive to the place and what it’s illuminating, what it’s telling me. I can’t be that way in New York – here, I must protect myself. But when I’m working, I can switch into that porous mode very easily by now: I’m walking around, I’m feeling. I’m also looking at basic things relating to photography, such as light, form and shadow.

CS Do you look at police photos of the events?

DM I look at district attorney’s reports, which often have photos. They don’t ever have a photograph of the victim, thankfully, but sometimes they’ll have markings on the ground. I don’t want to look at anything that showed the victim but whatever else is available, I see.

CS These men killed by the police are not usually seen as innocent victims – just the fact that the police killed them seems to suggest that these guys must have been bad.

DM Many victims have committed no crime, and many were killed while having a mental health breakdown. One of the things I realised while researching is how complicated the problem is. The police are reacting to a heavily armed population that police in other countries may not be confronted with. They are facing people who have severe mental health issues because social services have been eroded for the past 40 years. You see from bodycam footage how things can escalate. I am not saying the police are not at fault, but I think in certain cases, it’s more structural. You see how encountering someone with several guns, and off his medication, and unable to see a mental health worker because so many have been laid off, or not hired in the first place, can lead to a situation that becomes dangerous. The police have become terrifyingly more militarised and services that once took care of people are no longer there. It’s complicated. .