The Last Supper: Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy kidnapped, raped, and murdered scores of women during the 1970s, often revisiting the crime scenes to groom, mutilate and perform sexual acts on the decomposing bodies.  To this day Bundy’s total victim count remains unknown; he confessed to some 30 murders shortly before his execution, but it remains likely that the true number is significantly higher.

From death row Bundy gave a number of interviews, ostensibly to provide some explanation for his crimes and the forces that had driven him to become a serial killer.  These accounts were sometimes contradictory and often seem more like a sociopathic exercise in self-serving manipulation than a sincere effort at introspection.   Perhaps the most absurd example of this is the interview Bundy granted evangelical author James Dobson just days prior to his death.  In this bizarre 45-minute conversation Bundy happily parroted Dobson’s hand-wringing over depictions of sexuality in media, blaming his brutal crimes on an addiction to pornography.  (Most scholars familiar with Bundy’s case view his last-minute condemnation of pornography as yet another manipulative attempt to shift blame.  It remains unclear whether Dobson himself actually found this account plausible or if, perhaps, he simply wanted to use Bundy’s infamy to advance his own ultra-conservative talking points.)  The truth behind Bundy’s motivations remain elusive, as does a precise psychological diagnosis.  Regardless of what drove Bundy to commit such atrocities, it seems very unlikely that much valuable insight could be gleaned from interviewing the man.

Ted Bundy was executed by electrocution on January 24, 1989.

He declined a special final meal request and was given a traditional meal including steak, eggs, hash browns, and toast. 

According to witnesses, Bundy did not eat any of his last meal.

Symbolism and Inspiration

In this composition Bundy’s steak, raw and rotting, dangles precariously over the edge of the table, echoing our own precarious grasp on life.  His potatoes are withered and rotting, a reminder of death and the transience of all things.  Finally, the eggs are scattered throughout the image are reminders of Bundy’s brutality against his victims; each egg in the image is broken to some extent, each one delicately balanced, threatening to tumble to the floor.

Breakfast Still Life, by Willem Claesz. Heda (1637)

This image draws some inspiration from a 1637 Breakfast Still Life by Willem Claesz. Heda.  For my own image I borrowed Heda’s arrangement of the items on the table into a rough triangular geometry.  This kind of triangular structure was very much a signature stylistic flourish for Heda: many of his works from the mid-1630s invoke this pattern of starting on one end with flat plates, continuing with slightly larger objects such as goblets, and culminating in a zenith-like fashion with large beer or water jugs.  Another example of this kind of triangular/diagonal compositional rule is included below.

One of my favourite aspects of 17th century still life painting is the kind of geometric approach to composition displayed in Heda’s works — also appropriated in many of my own images.  If you study composition in the context of contemporary photography you tend to hear a lot of very boring stuff about the “rule” of the thirds, leading lines, interrupted patterns, etc.  I find this kind of treatment of the subject rather reductionist — the possibilities for composition are much broader than just the rule of thirds.  Sadly, I don’t think I have ever seen a modern photography book discuss any rules of composition as rich and symbolically meaningful as the kinds of geometric constructions that one finds on display in the works of the Dutch masters.