The Spellbinding Corrupted Photos On An Artist’s Stolen Laptop

Pasedena police called photographer Melanie Willhide to tell her the good news: they’d found her laptop and backup drive. They’d pulled over a car being driven by Adrian Rodriguez and spotted Willhide’s stolen possession on the back seat.  “It’s kind of like winning the lottery; it seemed so implausible,” she said.

The bad news was that Rodriguez had attempted to wipe the hard-drive. He’d also created a screensaver from a picture of his girlfriend and him.

Willhide and a friend began to scour the computer for anything she could salvage, whether from her personal pics or the two projects she’d been working on – a series of domestic circus pictures and an album of pictures taken in the swimming pools of celebrity homes in Palm Springs (fashioned after those found in life-saving manuals). She found her work, albeit changed.

“It was completely quiet,” says Willhide. “We’re the sort of friends where I know exactly what she’s thinking. She doesn’t have to say anything. And we’re looking through all of these images and I can sort of feel her body and she’s leaning forward and I said, ‘Oh my God, do you think it’s better?’ And she’s like ‘well, you know … ’ so I said, ‘I think it’s better.’ And she said, ‘Yes, it’s better.’”

Willhide published them in the book To Adrian Rodriguez, With Love.

Inspired by chance, Willhide replicated some of the corruption found in the recovered images. “It’s really about a life in relation to a machine and sort of dependency I’ve grown to have on this machine to house all these images that are really important and how delicate they are,” she says. “Utilizing the language of the corrupted files has a lot of potential. There’s something really powerful about seeing the delicacy of the digital file.”