There is a review of this show in today's New York Times (Friday), but I
cannot find it on their website.
Yes, I agree with Mark - if the photos are this recent (and the people still
alive) - it's more than a little scary that police departments are dumping
them back into the public. And the Gallerist obviously wants to churn not
even fresh into dollars. Love dealers, but this is dealer as parasitic
sleeze.
The attraction to the mug shot and the anonymous snap photograph, in
general, is that the pictures are not taken by professional with a
particular aesthetic frame in mind (Pictorialist, etc).. (Granted there is
always something operative no matter what we do. The principle could be as
simple as 'cute'.) And it is true you can get a certain kind of accuracy
when a picture is taken without a broader agenda. (After all a jail
photographer wants you as evidence, as something real and accurate for the
judge and witnesses to your crime).
In the Nineteeth and early 20th century Sheriffs in California would
preserve the mug shots in an accordion fold style leather envelope - three
inches in depth and about 12 inches long. The photographs appeared in
columns - four up to each fold.
The remarkable thing - which is still true - over the years the folks would
get arrested over and over again. Often starting as teenagers. Often of
color - Mexican, Indian. From envelope to envelope, you can watch them age
from one captivity to another. There is a definite sadness - looking -
there.
Ironically, it is the only visual record we have of these folks -many who
would not otherwise have been photographed. Though some look mean, and
sometimes deranged, it's an interesting, engaging panorama of characters.
But look, we are going through the death of the photograph as we have known
it. Bye-Bye Kodak. All of this stuff is going to be deemed more and more
valuable the more it is no longer the medium by which we record ourselves.
Gallerists who cannot afford to get into hire stake name photographers are
into a new game. (Mind us that there have been also great shows of Anonymous
photographs, and photographs used for evidence.)
Welcome digital and the way the new medium refines how 'we' look at
'ourselves.' Adobe eye shadow, anyone? Just raise the 'tint.'
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
Where currently is an account of
The Soundeye Poetry Festival
Cork, July 6 - 9/.
> 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
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