The Collected Lives of Katy Ebbert began when I met Katy Ebbert towards the end of the summer in 2012. When she was seventeen her best friend, Chris, was murdered by her then boyfriend, after Chris was suspected of talking to the police about various petty crimes in the small town where they all lived. In the aftermath of the murder, several teenagers, Katy included, and a five year old boy embarked on a three week cross-country crime spree that spanned eleven states. Katy was eventually picked up in a stolen vehicle with her boyfriend on the border of New Mexico, and extradited to Oregon to stand as a material witness in the trial of Chris’s murderers. The surreal tale of teenage violence, fear, lust, and crime on the run that fractured Katy’s life in 1992 is intertwined with images from her life today in an attempt to reconcile the pulpy entertainment that similar cultural myths of teenage violence provide with the daily reality that Katy confronts twenty plus years later.
Fact and fiction are freely conflated within the work and Katy’s own recountings, undermining the evidentiary aura that still surrounds photography, particularly that associated with ‘true crime’ narratives. The mix of fact and fiction, with occasional oblique nods to particular films and pieces of literature, further complicates the work, suggesting that the truths of Katy’s life lies outside of a true/false binary.
