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Jon Feinstein (or it might be Grant Willing?) over at Humble Art Foundation blog has been posting the art of serial killers in recent months.
THE DARKEST PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG ON THE CIRCUIT
If you thought serial killer art was as macabre as photography/arts blog could go, you’d be wrong. Every week, I am made to fear for my life because of what HAFNY has posted … and most weeks I find myself wondering “Is that real blood or fake blood?”
Put on your adult diapers and check it out.
ARGHT
“John Wayne Gacy is best known as the “Killer Clown” serial killer who murdered 33 people during the 1970s. While in Prison, Gacy took up painting; his favorite subjects being the Seven Dwarfs, Clowns, and other serial killers. He was executed in 1994 by lethal injection.”
“Ottis Toole was an American serial killer who was charged for three counts of murder, but confessed to four more after being incarcerated.”
“Henry Lee Lucas is an American serial killer who is best known for lying/falsely confessing to upwards of 600 murders. He was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of 11 murders; he died of heart failure while in prison, so the actual number of crimes committed will never be truly accurate.”
Claude Hankins
Thomas Gordon
Without question, the mugshot is a dominant “genre” in American photography. Least Wanted, aka Mark Michaelson, has released a book of his collected mugshots, Danny Lyon is fascinated by them, I’ve been seduced from time to time.
Arne Svenson is another artist who has put together mugshots (this time from the 19th century) to make a book. Svenson is a portraitist and his art is more complex when his collected mugshots and his headshots of forensic dummies & sock monkeys are considered alongside one another.
PRISONERS
“Svenson’s first book entitled Prisoners came about after the discovery of a collection of turn of the century glass plate negatives from Northern California recording convicted criminals as classic frontal and profile mug shots. He lovingly printed these negatives, bringing the subjects alive, and painstakingly researched each of their stories.” (Source)
Elliott Peterson
W.M. Heron
FORENSIC DUMMIES
Svenson spent four years traveling around the country to coroner’s offices and law enforcement agencies photographing forensic identification aids in a classic portraiture style. Twin Palms Publications will publish a book of this work, entitled Unspeaking Likeness, in 2010.
© Arne Svenson
SOCK MONKEYS
Unsurprisingly, the public and the market love Svenson’s 200 Sock Monkey portraits.
Sock Monkey #1761, 2001, Gelatin Silver Print. © Arne Svenson
See more at Jan Kesner Gallery
I found Pamela Bannos‘s portfolio via the MoCP, Midwest Photographers Project page. This was the same place I found the work of Tom Jones. There is plenty of other thought-provoking stuff (no prison photography though!) for you to while away an afternoon.
I am really taken by the quiet control of Bannos’ Some Untitled Pictures. Bannos: “In each of these found photographs I have tried to create a new history, or a new way of looking at a face or a gesture from another time. […] I am curious about how the illusion of photographic space can be re-constructed.”
More here.
It’s pretty cool that if you punch in ‘Broomberg and Chanarin‘ on Google, after their website, my commentary is next up.
I have great respect for Broomberg and Chanarin’s work.
Don’t worry, it won’t go on my resume or anything but it shows at least Google notices what I’m doing.
What would be the phrase for this faceless recognition? Googlelove > G-Love > Glove? I’m wittering.
Image: From Afterlife, an investigation and de-construction of iconic images taken in 1979 that came to define a moment in both Iranian and photographic history. (Source)
Last week the Daylight/CDS Photography Award winners were announced. Sarah Sudhoff’s latest project stood out. Whether it is deep enough or lasting or I can’t say, but it stood out.
Sudhoff: “At the Hour of Our Death takes as its starting point [Phillipe] Aries’s observation that “death’s invisibility enhances its terror”. These large-scale color photographs capture and fully illuminate swatches of bedding, carpet and upholstery marked with the signs of the passing of human life. The fabrics which are first removed by a trauma scene clean up crew, are relocated to a warehouse before being incinerated. It is in the warehouse that I photograph these fragments stained with bodily fluids. I tack each swatch to the wall and use the crew’s floodlights to illuminate the scene.”
Illness, Female, 60 years old. Archival Pigment Print, 2010. 40 x 30 inches
Other series in Sudhoff’s portfolio are worth a look, notably Repository which is a self-portrayal project about Sudhoff’s cervical cancer in 2005.
Steve Davis was in Montana last month and sent me some photographs from his visit to Old Montana Prison in Deer Lodge. Davis’ foray goes into the annals of tourist photography from prison museums.
Regarding prison museums, I have previously looked at the work of Roger Cremers, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Daniel Etter and Polaroids from Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Of course we shouldn’t forget that are prisons in the world in which both inmates and tourists co-mingle.
I never realised powerhouse was so prolific.
Singing the national anthem. © Ben Quinton
Perhaps it is just because I taught in a Kenyan High School in the Rift Valley a decade ago and it remains one of the most formative experiences of my life that I am so taken with Ben Quinton‘s art-docu series, The British Abroad.
By comparison, St Andrews School, which Quinton depicts is better equipped than the schools I visited (the swimming pool being the big giveaway).
The evocation of weather, multiple generations, institutional routine, the mix but not a clash per se of cultures and the vestiges of colonialism all make this an interesting portfolio.
I’d be interested to know if others enjoyed The British Abroad as much as I.
Found in the current issue of Seesaw Magazine.
Prison Photography 