The Face Is A Passport
In one of her sporadically repeated and perennially ignored cultural admonishments, Susan Sontag warned photographers and their audiences against “the urge to appropriate an alien reality.” Sontag worried about photography’s potential to reinforce an aesthetic tourism as a by- product of its consumption. We consume images, and especially photographs, indiscriminately, more so now than ever. Ours is not necessarily a mindless consumption—we often look at pictures with the express purpose of arousing social conscience or learning more about zones of the world we can’t personally experience.
Earl’s Bed (Hickory Pod) 2015
Photos have an incredible capacity to inspire compassion and concern, even in those not generally concerned or compassionate, even about lives and experiences uAerly unlike our own. We collect experiences through photographs. We feel for “them.”
Criminal Trespassing and Disorderly Conduct 2013
Megan at 16 2014
But Sontag warns us against collecting others’ realities. And that’s hard for us; it feels good to care about other people. Photographers make it easy to mentally substitute viewing another for knowing another, through a simple strategy: they show us their faces. Let’s call it a sort of facial metonymy, a shorthand in our minds that tells us the look of sadness on a sharecropper mother’s face cracks open the world of her pain, a world we can now understand.
We have this facile belief that what the face does, as the operative currency of (many kinds of) photography, is to “humanize” an other, to give access to a person separated from us by time, geography, experience, suffering. But in the case of many photographs whose subjects suffer, the face offers a false familiarity, an illegitimate passport into that alien reality. We trust our guts too much, too easily. We refuse to believe in alterity, in an experience viewed but not understood. On the emotional tourism of the photographic journey, we can own anything we can look at, including the experience of another person.
Jerome at 15 2014
Jaeshawn at 16 2014
That Zora J Murff’s Corrections eschews the usual face of portraiture indicates on one level an entrée into this conversation surrounding visual representation and appropriation. But it also reveals elements of photography’s history, and specifically the use of photography as a tool in the criminal justice system.
The relationship between photography and prisoners has always been one of appropriation, accumulation, collection, ordering, perusal. Beginning with rogues’ galleries and the Bertillon system right up to today’s inmates’ constantly clipped-on ID badges, the founding premise of prisoner photography is that to view a criminal is to know him, and to photograph him is to own him. His face becomes a mask merely soldered onto his crime.
Standard Issue: Jumpsuit 2014
Jaleel at 15 2015
Another notable cultural admonisher, Michel Foucault, adroitly observed that the tides of justice since the Middle Ages have been moving more and more toward punishing the criminal rather than the crime. In other words, the culture of punishment (or “correction,” to use our more occlusive twentieth-century term) treats the crime not as an act committed but as a manifestation of who that person is.
The flattening of crime, criminal, and face had a heyday in the works of Alphonse Bertillon and Cesare Lombroso, criminologists whose philosophies of criminal anthropometry and facial analysis engendered a manic thrust toward documentation of criminals’ faces and bodies, as well as the frenzied search for the “criminal type.” Though these turn-of-the-century intellectual fads faded, the culture continues to obsessively “read” the faces of criminals.
Memphis at 16 2013
Kenny at 19 2013
Think of the recent hubbub surrounding the mugshot of Jeremy Meeks a.k.a. “Prison Bae,” or the tragicomic parade of portraits on the nightly news. It’s as though we are constantly searching for a way to tie a person inextricably to their crime, through a photograph.
Awareness of and resistance to such narrative shortcuts permeate Corrections. The most striking collective feature of these photographs is the lack of faces—an imagistic trope as much as a legal requirement when photographing juveniles in the system. But the hiding of faces in this work transcends legal strictures and enmeshes itself in the creation of the images. At times, as in “Wendy at 14 and Sheila at 15”—with the inward commas of the girls’ bodies and the intimate or even secretive embrace—the images convey an intentionality in such hiding.
Lucas at 15 2014
Wendy at 14 and Sheila at 15 2014
There is a strength here, a sense of withholding one’s face rather than hiding it. “Earl at 15 (1:30pm Visit)” resonates with the girls’ curved-in portrait as well; his face obscured by a family member, “Earl” underscores the bonds that invite understanding and pointedly reserves the face for these familiars.
