On the Cover: Damon Locks, The World is a Different Place, Xerox, 2017.
Portable Grey, Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry University of Chicago Press Journals, Vol 5. no.1 pp 49-65. 2022
“Exposing the Hero” is a historical and material inquiry into the mugshot publishing industry, tracing its roots to the early photogravure process used for mass image replication in newspapers and policing during chattel slavery. After an invitation to contribute to this issue of Portable Gray, I decided to submit the image analyses I was already working on instead of a written piece. I scrubbed fifteen pages of images from the Chicagoland area published on a third-party citizen policing website and used them as the project's material.
The work follows the mugshot from early print reproduction into contemporary online archives, and asks what custody means once a photograph outlives the case that produced it. In the absence of a physical negative, how long does the digital positive labor, and who holds the authority to release the person depicted once that authority has passed from the state to a website.. Unlike analog processes, which end when a print is destroyed or a negative degrades, digital circulation has no equivalent point of release, so the image remains in a kind of custody that no court granted and no parole board can revisit. The project uses the architecture and advertising of the web page itself as a method, treating site structure as a way of asking how images can re-incarcerate the people who appear in them long after their sentence, charge, or arrest has ceased to matter to anyone but the platform hosting their face.
Published mugshots from multi-jurisdictional and third-party citizen policing sites, including Mugshots.com, feed a carceral economy that outlives the legal process it claims to document, holding people with no warden and no release date. Exposing the Hero asks who is responsible for granting freedom to an image, and whether that freedom is even possible once the state's authority to hold a person has been quietly inherited by a server.
“Exposing the Hero.” Portable Grey, Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, University of Chicago Press Journals, Vol 5. no.1 pp 49-65. 2022