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