We all joke about our passport and driver’s license pictures. Fortunately, most of us are spared the humiliation of posing for a police mug shot.
The recent arrest of astronaut, Lisa Nowak and the story of the tawdry and tragic love triangle at NASA has caught the attention of the entire nation. People are wondering what obsessive passion and desperation drove Nowak, an accomplished woman with a bright future and a mother of three young children to resort to so reckless an act. Speculations about her psychological health along with endless "diaper" stories have filled the airwaves. What particularly caught my eye was the stark contrast between Nowak’s before and after photos – the first a NASA issued picture of a radiant astronaut and the other of a woebegone soul at the time of her arrest. I kept wondering what was going through her mind at the time the second photo was shot.
By exquisite happenstance, I stumbled upon an "arresting" story in the Smithsonian about artist Mark Michaelson and his collection of prison mug shots. Michaelson, a graphic designer, has in his possession thousands of police photos of suspects, gathered initially with no clear project in mind. Recently he exhibited them in a New York City gallery and has published them as a book. I was fascinated by the striking quality of the black and white pictures and the expressions on the faces of the subjects. Needless to say, none of them appeared to be saying "cheese" – the solemn and stony faces surely hid numerous grim tales of passions, failings, treacheries and tragedies. But one can only wonder. Michaelson’s crooks were small time, petty criminals. Not much is known about them, nor why they chose the crooked path to infamy.
Michaelson, who has worked at Newsweek, Radar and other magazines, got interested in underworld imagery after a friend gave him a Wanted poster of Patty Hearst. For his collection, however, he avoided famous people and notorious criminals in favor of what he calls "the small-timers, the least wanted." His book is even called Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots. It is a sort of accidental tour of the crooked, down and out or unlucky. But because Michaelson, 51, knows little or nothing about most of the subjects, readers have to supply the backstory. "I don’t have any more info than what the viewer gets," Michaelson says in a telephone interview from Berlin, where he now lives.
Why, exactly, were the pair of Fresno cross-dressers—clad like modest housewives—arrested on successive Tuesdays in 1963? What sort of upbringing, if that’s the word, befell a Pennsylvania boy known as Mouse, who was arrested in the 1940s at ages 13, 14 and 18? We can only wonder. If the pictures are short on detail, they still add up to a vivid, impressionistic archive of American metamorphosis: bowler hats and beehives; Depression-era vagrancy and a 1970s narcotics bust; the arrival of Irish, German and Italian immigrants; the first wave of anti-Communism, in the 1930s, with the accused Communists’ mugs mounted on pink cards; and the racism, as in the description of a Missouri man (a "close mouthed Negro who is probably committing burglaries"), who was arrested in 1938 for stealing "several pairs of stockings."
The New York Times called the pictures "a catalog of the human face and the things that can happen to it." ….
But we are drawn to the photographs by their undeniable authenticity. In this day of flickering instantaneous images and photo-manipulation software, the mugs stare back as rare artifacts. "In an increasingly digital world," Michaelson notes in the book, "the hard copy original is an endangered species." Yet there’s something else. The Least Wanted images intrigue us in the way a collection of old passport photos might not. A mug shot captures people at their lowest or most vulnerable. We look hard at their faces, calculating guilt or innocence. And then look harder.
You can see Michaelson’s rogues art gallery on Flickr here. It is a large compilation but a few pages, starting at page 4, will give you a good idea. The gallery is also viewable as a slide show.
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