Instead of using her usual setup, a 4-by-5 view camera, she decided on a small-format digital that would appear less intimidating.
Often she was struck by the quality of her subjects' silence. "I think they are really conscious of the fact that this was painful, but it was being offered up as a spiritual sacrifice in honor of a dead friend. So they saw it as a small sacrifice."
Marine Brandon Johnson had been carrying the idea in his head after about eight servicemen he'd known and been friends with were killed from 2003 to 2005. He'd taken a photo of a soldier's memorial -- the gun, helmet, boots. He sketched in a shadow of a cross. "People ask about it," Johnson says. Often he just gives a shorthand version. "A lot of people, really, they don't want details. You can tell." For him the tattoo's meaning is layered. "Just the memory of them. Just something I want to have for when I'm older."
Seeing her work reproduced larger than life, the skin's abrasions, the messages themselves, "put me in a place that caused discomfort," Heffernan says. And if those who view it shudder or squirm, she hopes that those reactions are somehow productive -- that they lead to empathy. In their stark way, as they move out into the world, she hopes that the images become their own irritants, provocations: "I've been interested in skin as an intensified site between self and other, between nature and culture," Heffernan says, "the place that culture writes itself upon. But when we see the welted skin or the tissue fluid oozing to the surface of the skin, there's the message: The body is almost writing back."
lynell.george@latimes.com
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'The Soldier's Skin: An Endless Edition'
Where: Pasadena City College Art Gallery, 1750 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
When: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, noon to 4 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Closed Sundays.
Ends: Nov. 17
Price: Free
Contact: (626) 585-3285 or (626) 585-7238
