"Which is not to say in any way that Metinides's photographs are lacking in humanity. Quite the opposite. They are overflowing with humanity. In fact, that is the real trouble with them - they show us too much humanity. In Metinides's images, we don't just see the body dragged out of the water after the drowning, we see the drowned man underwater, the grey corpse hovering at the bottom of the swimming pool. Or a body being dragged to the bank of a river, like some awful bait trawled at the end of a rope, the spectators on the far bank an inverted frieze reflected in the muddy water. We see things we feel we shouldn't be looking at, but it is hard to drag our eyes away. The dead woman, with her shiny red nails and blonde coiffure, draped over a mangled post after being hit by a car at a pedestrian crossing, her made-up face grim in death, just at the moment when the paramedic is about to cover her with a blanket. Metinides's images are sometimes made more unsettling by their evident aestheticisation, or perhaps rather the way we place them among other kinds of images, as if to defuse them, render them more acceptable."
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