Trawler’s photographs

The Trawler’s photographs are a staged archive of surveillance: black-and-white images that expose private relationships, track Bret Ellis through places tied to Matt Kellner, and turn the act of looking into a threat. First shown to Susan Reynolds in an envelope left in her mailbox, they move from evidence of her secret time with Robert Mallory to a December package documenting Bret’s movements and returning him, in images, to Matt’s final night.

The photographs left for Susan

Susan examines a series of eight-by-ten photographs while recovering from the attack that injured her and Thom Wright. The images are black and white and appear to have been taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. They show Susan and Robert together in Palm Springs, seated at Las Casuelas and relaxing at her grandparents’ house; other pictures show them wading in the pool and standing beside a white BMW in the Buckley senior parking lot. The vantage points make their private encounters look observed rather than shared: the photograph of the parking lot was taken from the surrounding hillsides, while the Las Casuelas image was shot from across North Palm Canyon Drive.

The series also follows Susan apart from Robert. One photograph shows her getting out of her BMW and entering Century Towers; another shows her alone on Gilley Field with a tennis racket. When Bret asks who took the pictures, Susan says they were left in the mailbox. She does not know their maker, and her medicated state leaves her absorbed chiefly in the photographs with Robert. Her question to Bret about whether he took them momentarily turns the images into an accusation within their friendship. He denies it, but the photographs have already made intimacy look like something that can be watched, collected, and delivered to a home.

The December package for Bret

Before Christmas break, Bret finds a sealed manila envelope on the kitchen island, addressed only with his name, misspelled as BRETT with two t’s. He carries it to his bedroom, locks the door, and opens it alone. Inside are roughly forty black-and-white photographs, many made with a telephoto lens. Their sequence maps a widening circuit of observation: first Bret on the Gilley Field bleachers, alone and then with Robert; then Bret approaching and entering the Benedict Canyon house; then scenes connected to Matt and the places Bret has visited since.

The Benedict Canyon images preserve separate steps rather than merely a single arrival. Bret appears in his school uniform beside his mother’s Jaguar, looking up at the house; in another frame he tries the front-door handle, and in others he circles the building, pushes open the wrought-iron gate, gets out of a 450SL, and slips inside through a side door. Their accumulation turns an episode of trespass into a sequence the unseen photographer has already witnessed and retained. The package also includes an image of Bret leaving Matt in the pool house on Haskell Avenue, taken from a van parked down the street. The picture catches Bret’s face clenched with tears or perhaps anger, leaving the expression uncertain while making the watcher’s proximity unmistakable.

Five unoccupied interior photographs show a living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a backyard with a tiled fountain and ficus tree. Bret recognizes them as views inside his aunt’s house on South Toledo Avenue in Palm Springs. Five more images were taken inside his own Mulholland home: the garage without the 450SL, the empty living room, his bathroom and bedroom, and the comforter bearing the Maxell tape and Matt’s jockey shorts. The photographs therefore record not only Bret in public or at places he entered, but the interiors and objects of his private life. Their inclusion makes the envelope an inventory of access as much as a record of movement.

Matt and the watcher’s frame

The final photographs return the package to Matt. In a medium or close view, he stands on a bluff above the Pacific as the sky darkens, wearing a windbreaker with a backpack slung over his shoulder. A pentagram has been drawn in black marker on the glossy mat. Another image shows him in a deserted parking lot, looking lost but not frightened; in a third, he looks away and half-smiles at someone outside the frame. Bret recognizes the setting as Crystal Cove before night fell and the bonfire was built.

The beige van is visible behind Matt’s right shoulder, almost blending into the sand and sky. Its door is open, and its position conceals the license plate. Above Matt, someone has scrawled shhhhh. The photograph does not explain what happened next, but it places an apparently ordinary vehicle in the scene and marks Matt as watched. The van’s unobtrusive presence connects this image to the earlier photograph of Bret leaving Matt, also taken from a van down the street. In both, the watcher occupies the edge of the frame while the subject remains exposed within it.

The last image is of Shingy, photographed in a bare white room with a cardboard box behind him. The dog has no collar and has been shorn below the neck; one eye is missing and his tail has been cut off. A red felt-marker pentagram hovers above his cocked head. The image’s stark setting and deliberate markings make the dog’s mutilation part of the same visual sequence as Matt’s portraits, converting the package from documentation into an explicit display of cruelty. Shingy is not simply another person being followed: the photograph makes the threat tangible through what has been done to him.

A visual campaign of surveillance

The photographs are connected to the Trawler’s larger campaign by the Trawler’s own account. In a letter, the Trawler describes leaving gifts for the God’s classmates, including mementos, photographs, and posters. The letter also says that the Trawler and his friends had become intimate with many of the God’s acquaintances, without naming them. These statements place photographs within a deliberate pattern of gifts and watching, rather than establishing the identity of the photographer of any particular image. The two envelopes in the narrative—one delivered to Susan and the December package to Bret—show how that pattern reaches people in Robert’s circle and turns their personal histories into material for an unseen audience.

As physical objects, the photographs preserve what their subjects do not know is being recorded. A mailbox delivery can expose an affair; an image from a distant hillside can reveal the watcher’s angle; interior views can demonstrate access without explaining how it was gained. Bret’s package is especially unsettling because it assembles scenes from different periods and locations, culminating in Matt and Shingy. Its sequence does not resolve every mystery about the Trawler’s actions, but it makes the reach of the surveillance unmistakable: the watcher has been close to Bret’s most private spaces and to the memories he is trying to understand. The photographs leave him not with a complete account, but with proof that someone else has been arranging and preserving his story.