----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2006 3:44 PM
Subject: politics, the cost, etc.
> 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
>
Was very moved by your post, Mark. Wrote the following a few weeks ago,
thinking of essentially the same problem:
Contemporary Art
I was complaining to Jim, my artist friend,
about contemporary art. Crude cartoons
of Robin sucking off Batman, etc.; one sold
for twenty grand. Photographs of photographs.
Second-wave neo-expressionists expressing
nothing. "You don't understand," said Jim.
"The viewer comes to each of these
with an illusion. An illusory expectation.
Of composition, say, or subtlety,
a point or subtext; even a new shock.
And in each case the expectation
is frustrated. Something is lacking
that never was before. And so the viewer,
however hard he thinks
he is, finds he still had an illusion,
and congratulates himself for having had it
as he is saying goodbye. Think of the energy
paradoxically released from black holes. It's
still art, you see; it fucks you
the way the Market does, only faster and deeper."
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