“Crime Unseen” Should Be Anything But

Crime Unseen is running at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography thru January 15th.  Admission is free.

Crime Unseen is a show examining two worlds of photography.  It is an exhibition exploring how photography – drawing on “photojournalism, forensic photography and documentary landscape” – reflects and records crime, inquiring as to the impact a violent act can have on a participant, a witness, a location, or a society.  Curator and Associate Director Karen Irvine for the Museum explains on the web page dedicated to the exhibition: “In fighting crime, the notion of truth is imperative, so we put photographs to work as a way of determining the actions and identities of perpetrators, though sometimes such judgments prove to be inaccurate.”

Though photography is the most accurate visual representation that has yet been devised, it is still just that: a representation.  It can be altered, and even when it is unadulterated, its capacity for truth is severely limited.  Because of this assumed inherent objectivity, though, some things are lost.  First is a sense of context, where undeserved value is placed on the photograph as evidence of pure fact and representation of reality.  The second sacrificed element is often the human connection between the viewer of the photographer and the forensic eye which is examining it.  A photographed knife is viewed merely as evidence, where its size is measured, its location is documented, and the blood splatter is analyzed.  It becomes removed from the actual act it was used in, detached from the flesh it tore.  The lens and film create a barrier, separating the traditionally analytic and forensic eyes for which crime photography was originally intended.  The show’s best works permeate or completely remove that barrier.  They comment upon the disparate subjectivity and objectivity that a photograph can provide, and “actively engage with myth and reality as they question the roles of memory, the media, and evidence in solving and remembering crime.”

Two collections within the exhibit – selections from the Chicago History Museum’s archives from the Chicago Daily New, and Christopher Dawson’s series Coverage – both explore what, historically, was the first step of photography’s estrangement from objective truth: its use in the media, specifically in its use in news reporting and photojournalism.  By taking images and presenting them with reporting intended for the general public, the truth within the images is sacrificed.  The stories accompanying them, at best, must be distilled, leaving out supposedly irrelevant details that could be essential in properly understanding and contextualizing the image and the events they are recording.  At worst, they are altered or re-contextualized to serve a purpose other than presenting fact, whether it be a political purpose or simply to sensationalize the events in order to sell issues or add space.  The motivation to inform is supplanted by the motivation to profit.

The collection from the archives of the Chicago Daily News, including famous photographs of the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, and serve as documents not only of those events, but of photojournalism’s early days.  Dawson’s Coverage, on the other hand, takes the post-modernist approach of documenting the documentation.  He has photographed the massive media coverage of major crime stories such as the trials of O.J. Simpson, Barry Madof and Casey Anthony.  His photographs contain images of masses of reporters and endless lines of news vans, all idle and laying in wait for some new development in the story, even if it’s as minor as a person leaving a home.  They echo, in many ways, Garry Winnogrand’s well-known photograph of the Elliot Richardson news conference, pulled back and exposing the wires and equipment involved in recording and staging the “news.”  Dawson, instead of pulling back, has simply turned the camera completely around, and photographed nothing but the artifice of creating the news.  His pictures are all wires and equipment, with the actual “news” absent.

In one of Dawson’s the photographs of vehicles amassed during the Casey Anthony trial, there is a campaign sign for a candidate named Van Fleet running for some elected office.  It is a humorous pun on what we are actually viewing – a fleet of vans – but also serves to pointedly question the role that the news media, with all of its embellishments and sensationalism, has come to play in our society.  Are they, in fact, leading us, and did we elect them or not?  Each of these collections is interesting and of either artistic or historic value (or both) on their own, but together, they draw a clear through-line from the early days of photojournalism where the seeds of luridness and melodrama were planted, and the modern day, where we are reaping its fruits.

Perhaps the most ambitious (though for this writer, least effective) work attempted to create a partially-fictional narrative out of a specific historical crime.  Christian Patterson’s series explores the murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugit during the winter of 1957-58, whose pursuit, capture and trial captured the imagination of the American public. Patterson believes “the most important implications of the crime are located not in the social or in the collective, but in the interior responses we have to it—emotionally, intellectually, and in our imaginations.”  Patterson appropriates archival photographs from the crimes along with his own created images, as well as other mixed media pieces.

As Patterson’s series is the most obviously post-modern in the exhibit, it is ironic that where it succeeds most is on a purely formal level.  His attempts to connect such disparate images as empty roads and houses at night with shotgun scatter through museum board or photographs of bloody snow, all tied together with an unexplained fictional account loosely based upon historical murders that have all but vanished from the public consciousness, fails to ground the series or grant it any cohesion.  The pieces work best when standing on their own.  Photographs of a single spent shotgun shell lying on the ground or of blood streaked snow are highly graphical, with the shapes of the objects themselves, and the shadows they create, echoing works from the Purist movement in the early parts of the 20^th century.  The most successful piece is one of a house of cards, exposed multiple times from different angles.  It plays with the concept of point of view, of how a slight shift in one’s perspective can completely alter their world and send everything crashing down like, well, a house of cards.  Sadly, the unity of his series’ theme is equally tenuous.

All of the photographers involved in the show take different approaches to looking at the intersections between crime and photography, though all, in some way, look at its effects.  Those effects can be quite disparate, though, varying in the specificity of the crime, and the focus on either the human or societal impacts of the crime.  The most expansive approach comes from Krista Wortendyke in her piece Killing Season: Chicago.  Between October 2010 and January 2011, Wortendyke photographed the site of every homicide in the city, often days or weeks after the crime was committed.  These photographs are arranged chronologically on a wall.  In times when there were many murders, the photographs rise high, while gaps between crimes leave gaps, creating the image of a city skyline.  The images, absent of context, are exceedingly banal, combined with the unique display method, all serve to illustrate how violence and crime disappears into the make-up of a city, and can become as integral to its composition as its buildings.

Just as removed, though more specific to particular events, is the work of Angela Strassheim.  Having worked as a forensic photographer as well as having an MFA, she has a foot firmly planted in both objective and subjective photography, which her pieces reflect.  Strassheim’s work is divided into two types.  The first are a simple series of color photographs, almost a pure snapshot aesthetic, of various locations.  They are crime scenes, and the photograph is simply titled a piece of evidence, such as a field with a “No Trespass” sign titled “Small rod, kitchen knife.”  Like in the photographs in Killing Season: Chicago, the triviality of these photographs belies the violence that occurred there, and with the haunting yet vague imagery placed in the viewer’s head by the titles, create a haunting effect.

Equally haunting is her other series of photographs, these of specific crime scenes.  Developed in stark, high-contrast black and white,  show rooms in which crimes have been committed, using equipment to expose old blood splatter in almost fluorescent, glowing white.  Though the rooms are ostensibly empty, the effect is given that something, in addition to the blood, remains.  In one piece, “Evidence No. 11,” there is a radiant TV blaring pure white, almost as bright as the blood cast against the wall.  It is reminiscent of the “hydrogen” jukebox in Robert Frank’s The Americans: technology showing the only sign of life in an empty and lifeless room.

Deborah Luster’s collection Tooth for an Eye, at first glance, seems to have a similar remove to other works in the show.  Black and white photographs of the locations of murders in New Orleans – a gas station, a park, an empty lot – all framed in a perfect circle.  The photos  are hung in a large four by six display, creating a mass effect similar to the wall display for Killing Season: Chicago.  Hints of a more human and personal touch emerge, though; where Stressheim simply titled her photographs via the objects involved, Luster’s photographs include the name and age of the victim, with the round framing echoing a bullet hole or target sight.  The artist, in her own words, “takes a close look at something that no longer exists—an invisible population—in the only way in which one can approach such things, obliquely and through reference.”  This humanistic and less removed approach is a clear result of the artist’s own experience – her mother was the victim of murder.  As violent crime has intruded itself into her own life so much, it makes sense that she doesn’t maintain the more removed and analytical approach of other photographers in the exhibition.

A similar personal approach is taken by Taryn Simon in her video project The Innocents.  Where others have been focusing on the direct victims of crimes, Simon records interviews of victims of another type: people who have served time for violent crimes that they didn’t commit.  These recordings take place at some site of significance: where they were misidentified, where they arrested, where they were when the crime was committed, etc.  It an ethos with the Marxist-Realist approach to documentary photography of including the voice of the work’s subject, with these men’s voices forming the bones on which the power of the images rest.

The best works of the show, though, are the photographs by Corinne May Botz.  Botz photographed recreations of crime scenes in dollhouses, which were used in the 1940s and 50s to train police officers skills towards examining evidence.  What is most discomfiting about the images is the contrast between the grisly nature of the recreated scene – blood splatter near cribs, bullet holes, dolls laid out as corpses – with the idyllic nature and innocence of what is traditionally a child’s toy.  It also comments upon the layers of representation in crime photography; these are recreations on film of events that were already recreated in the dollhouse, adding layers upon layers of separation between the viewers in the gallery looking at the images with the actual violent events that inspired them.  Paradoxically, the photos are more affecting, partially because that disconnect is at the forefront, along with the juxtaposition of the dystopic scene in what was once an idyllic setting.

Though photographs are incredibly accurate representations of their subjects, they are still just that – representations.  As they have become a hallmark of our society’s recordings of crimes, from the news media to forensic work, they have been relied on more and more to convey exact truths, a task which they are sometimes imperfectly suited towards.  None of the photographs in Crimes Unseen are of crimes being committed – of crimes seen.  They are simply how police or the media or artists or simply humans have tried to understand what happened.  What the works in Crime Unseen manage to do is to eschew the essential truth of crime photographs, and look more towards the human truths underneath.

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