Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood, published by MACK in 2011, takes the 1958 Nebraska killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate as its charged historical point of departure. The book does not simply illustrate the crime or reconstruct it as a linear account. Instead, it gathers photographs of places and objects connected to the case, images prompted by the story, and discoveries made along the way, allowing the landscape to remain both evidence and enigma.

Patterson’s method deliberately crosses photographic registers. Photojournalism, forensic imagery, appropriation, reenactment, and documentary landscape photography are brought into tension rather than arranged as a single authoritative style. The work questions how a violent past is pictured, and how photographic form can unsettle the boundary between fact and invention. Its pre-existing archive is reworked through an intentional mingling of past and present, myth and reality, while the underlying narrative is expanded and re-presented rather than treated as settled history.

Photographs form the book’s core, but they are accompanied by documents and objects associated with the killers and their victims: a map, poem, confession letter, stuffed animal, hood ornament, and other materials. Some were first discovered by Patterson and are presented here as part of the work’s investigative structure. Designed as a visual crime dossier, the volume includes inserted papers and uses its varied components as cues within an unresolved puzzle. Connections remain for the reader to establish; certain mysteries are left open.

For serious collectors, the book’s importance lies in this fusion of photographic inquiry, archival manipulation, and precise book construction. Its 168 pages do not merely contain a sequence of images but stage an encounter with evidence, memory, and the limits of representation. The result is a demanding and distinctive photobook: one in which looking becomes a form of investigation, and where the instability of the story is inseparable from the way it is shown.