I found your whole post thoughtful & provocative of thought, Mark. And
responses such as Fred's.
I think you're absolutely right about the moral abysm of putting these
up for sale. But as I try to track from photography to poetry, I'm a
little unsure. Does just approaching certain subjects, or is it that
the poet/poem can't help 'exploiting' it?, put it in a similar moral
space? Or would it be in the use (again, perhaps to be called
'exploitation?) of documents? I am thinking of what I see as proper
use, & one which strikes me as 'political': that of Susan Howe (for
example; I know, I keep coming back to her work), which seems to me to
be a highly 'moral' attempt to come to terms with historical violence
manifest in various times & ways.
We still see poetry as definitely a form of art; photography remains
ambiguously on the border, sometimes in, sometimes out. Which does
bring us back to your comments on intention, of both photographers &
subjects, as well as just exactly what was the intention (beyond making
money off them) of the curator here...
Yeah: makes me think...
Doug
On 15-Sep-06, at 1:44 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> Last night I went to an opening of a photography show at the Steven
> Karsher Gallery in NY's Chelsea. Some of the issues it raised for me
> resonate with recent discussions here.
>
> It was a show of mug shots from about 1930 to the mid 60s, apparently
> discards from five or six midwestern police stations, bought, and
> framed for exhibition. In maybe 3/4 of cases there was no identifying
> documentation, but where there was the alleged crimes were fairly
> petty--vagrancy, check kiting, unlawful assembly, forgery of small-sum
> checks, shoplifting--and many had not yet been tried, and a few had
> had their charges dropped. But context made them all into hardened
> criminals. Most of the faces betrayed no clearly-identifiable emotion
> (though a few appeared mildly defiant and a few others looked
> terrified) during what must have been among the most humiliating
> moments of their lives. The photos, all by anonymous cops who weren't
> out to make art or engage the sitters, were interesting largely
> because of hair and clothing styles and the lurid context in which
> they were made. The subjects appeared to be overwhelmingly working
> class or sub-working class, people that the dressy crowd at the show
> would be unlikely to notice.
>
> I was extremely uncomfortable. It was impossible not to query these
> anonymous faces, but to what end? They had become art by virtue of
> their placement on the walls of the gallery. No one had asked their
> permission. In some cases the subjects were presumably still alive, as
> they were young when their photos were taken in the 60s. In the
> instances in which their names were known no one had attempted to
> contact them or their heirs. It seemed to me that they had been turned
> into freaks for our delectation, that there had been an essential
> violation.
>
> I thought about my very different reactions to other shows of
> unwitting subjects by anonymous photographers. Some years ago I saw at
> the Los Angeles County Museum a show of photos taken for bureaucratic
> record keeping just prior to the subjects' executions by anonymous
> photographers, from childhood to extreme old age, charged with no
> crimes, victims of Pol Pot's insanity and the army of sociopaths he'd
> managed to assemble. They were terrified, and eloquent. Last year the
> New York Historical Society mounted an exhibition of lynching
> postcards--that's right, they were commercially produced and sold like
> hotcakes immediately after the events, to be sent to one's loved-ones.
> On permanent display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington are family
> pictures of 1500 people, all that's left of the 5000 killed by the
> nazis in one stetl. In each case it was almost unbearable being in the
> room with them. But I didn't feel the queaziness that I felt last
> night. I think the setting, and the motive, had a lot to do with my
> feelings. These were museum shows, mounted for an explicitly political
> purpose, as an indictment not of the subjects but of their killers,
> and a plea fro remembrance and for such things never to happen again.
> Faint hope of that, but one's moral position in their presence was
> unambiguous and unambivalent--these people were being appropriated,
> but it was hard to believe that they would have objected to this shred
> of their humanity being preserved. And they weren't for sale--the
> gallery was offering its wares for between $500 and $700 for each of
> the 1x2 inch photos, and one could also buy a copy of limited edition
> poster-sized blowups of four of the shots, signed by the curator as if
> he was the artist, at $500 a pop, suitable for hanging over one's
> expensive couch. The worst moment of someone's life, perhaps, sold to
> the highest bidder. Utter corruption, it seemed to me. The show was
> called "Least Wanted." The irony of the photos being sold as luxury
> items seemed to have been lost on those involved.
>
> I own a few anonymous portraits of anonymous subjects, tintypes and
> daguerotypes that I've found at tag sales. Much of the interest is
> historical nostalgia. I'm certainly violating someone's space, but
> between me and the subject is a photographer paid or persuaded to take
> the picture, with whom the subject is collaborating--the image put
> forward is meant to be a shared image.
>
> Some of the pleasure of photo portraits is voyeuristic, irreducibly
> so. The morality of photography is I think about channeling that
> voyeurism by means of explicit intentionality, and the judgement one
> makes is about what that intention may have been. Belloq's portraits
> of Storeyville whores are so clearly the product of a shared
> intentionality that they transcend the moral qualms one would have
> expected to be present.
>
> When I expressed some of these thoughts to a friend at last night's
> opening she asked me what I thought about Diane Arbus. Arbus shot a
> wide range of subjects, but some of her best work, and certainly her
> most famous, was portraits of freaks of one kind or another. Her
> subjects knew what she was doing--they consented to the portraits,
> usually shot in their homes. And there was something else. Arbus, who
> as a young woman was movie-star beautiful, seems to have thought of
> herself as a freak, and in the portraits there's both a sense of
> identification and a compassion that have been noted by critic after
> critic. Either it's there or Arbus was able to fabricate it pretty
> convincingly. The portraits appear to have cost her something, as did
> Belloq's. The cost behind last night's mug shots was nonexistent for
> the curator, who I think was right in a sense to sign his name to the
> posters--he was the one who decided they were art, and he was the one
> who would pocket the cash. As Carlos just told me, he was signing a
> check to himself.
>
> Mark
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Where philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin. He was
a man, far away from home, biting his nails at destiny.
Susan Howe
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