PRISONERS

In 1994, I discovered a cache of glass negative mug shots taken in the early 20th century; each negative was inscribed with the man’s name and their alleged crime, disparate as the theft of a horse blanket to cold-blooded murder by a child of fourteen. The portraits, taken by the town photographer Clara Smith were compelling, naturalistic and haunting, motivating me to embark upon a painstaking research into the life of each man pictured in the five hundred negatives. To facilitate this project, I spent the next three years traveling back and forth from New York to the small Northern California town where I discovered the photos had been taken.

The only extant records of the men's crimes were the newspapers of the time, housed in the town library. I read through every copy of the daily newspaper(s) from 1901 to 1908 to find news of the men pictured in the images. For the exhibition/book, I printed the negatives as appropriation and the resultant work was not only an aesthetic, historical and philosophical evocation of these men's lives, but also addresses the issue of how the melding of a portrait, a name and an alleged crime/label, can morph into the total identity of a person and freeze that identity for all time.