Robbie McClaran
Portland, Oregon
Timothy McVeigh, 1996-1997
Lambda print

April 19, 2015

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City where 168 people, including 19 children, were killed. A year after the bombing, on the eve of my appointment to photograph Timothy McVeigh –who was later convicted of the crime –I visited the site and made these photographs.

The ruins of the building had been mostly removed. Memorials in the form of wooden crosses, made from splintered fragments left by the bombing, dotted the fence surrounding the site. Across the street, the ruins of another building destroyed by McVeigh’s bomb still stood.

It was said McVeigh was motivated by the events that took place two years earlier, also on April 19, in 1993, when federal troops stormed the Branch Davidian compound where followers of David Koresh had been under siege by the FBI since February of that year. On that awful day, 76 people were killed.

I also visited that site, trying to make some sense of what happened. The scenes were no less appalling than what I had seen in Oklahoma City. I left with no better understanding of how something like that can happen in a supposed civil society.

The day I photographed McVeigh left me even more baffled and saddened. I found him to be intelligent and upbeat and utterly remorseless. I’ve long been an opponent of the death penalty, but I shed no tears for Timothy McVeigh when he was executed in 2001.

These events 20 and more years ago share striking and frightening parallels to events happening today. Heavily armed anti-government militias continue to attract more followers, while police continue to kill unarmed citizens at a terrifying rate, while quelling protesters with military-grade weaponry.

And each year I hold my breath on April 19, praying something terrible won’t happen again.

Bio
Robbie McClaran is a freelance photographer based in Portland, Oregon, whose work appears in numerous magazines.

Back to Artists