Mug shots often seem to possess a truth that formal portraits and candid snapshots rarely do. These police-station pictures are taken – are made – on the occasion of a discovered transgression: violence, deceit, immorality. The pictures, snapped soon after the subject’s arrest, convey defiance, inebriation, disaster, or shame, visual embodiments of whatever darkness resides in the secret chambers of the heart. They are also often just sad, the pathetic, boozy shambles made of a life distilled into a single image – or sometimes two images side-by-side, though the face in profile conveys merely its features, a structure with little substance. It’s the full face, the blank stare or piercing gaze or the eyes’ tearful pleading, that tells the story.
A few years ago, while searching through the virtual photograph collection of the New Orleans Public Library – my grandfather spent a decade directing the city’s public recreation program, and I knew there were pictures of him in that archive – I clicked the link to a collection of mug shots made between 1900 and 1920. I was struck by the quality of these images, as if a true photographer rather than simply a police officer had taken the pictures, which might well have been the case. Cameras then were not what they are now; they required training, practice, skill. And they required time. I was also struck by what seemed to me the dignity they capture. Though often bedraggled, the subjects – pickpockets, forgerers, prostitutes, con men – peer into the camera without apparent shame, their clothes much more formal than what an arrested person – or anyone else, for that matter – would likely be wearing today.
Since my first encounter with these historical mug shots, I’ve used them to make my own pictures. In general, the art I make is created by manipulating, with two simple apps on my iPhone, photographs I’ve taken, mostly of the natural world: dried milkweed pods, browning magnolia blossoms, papery hydrangea flowers, torn and withered leaves. (You can find thousands of examples here.) I seem to be interested in the process of decay and the beauty to be found there. In that sense, I guess, these mug shots are consistent with the rest of the art I make. Here are lives in ruin, depicted in brown and faded pictures taken long ago. They are somehow beautiful, and I’ve tried to join them with the pictures I’ve taken. I’ve tried to make something of my own from them.
