--President Ronald Reagan, addressing the International Association of Chiefs of Police, September 28, 1981.
During the week of January 9-16, 1982, TV Guide listed 143 different programs featuring police officers, detectives, criminal lawyers or prisons as entertainment. The San Francisco Chronicle reported 196 crime-related items, and two exhibits -- Richard Lawson's The Joliet Prison Photographs, 1890-1930 and Paul Pernish's What It Is -- Riding with the Oakland Police -- opened at San Francisco Camerawork Gallery.
The Joliet Prison photographs were made by anonymous inmates "under official direction" to illustrate progressive changes during an era of penal reform which lasted until the beginning of World War I. Richard Lawson's carefully researched catalog and fine modern prints draw upon thousands of glass negatives, producing a remarkable insight into a brief moment of social progress attempted at the turn of the century.
These are silent, orderly photographs, immensely rich in detail. Massive stone buildings, shops where furniture and brooms were made (and the rehabilitation of the work ethic effected), chapels, classrooms, and richly furnished libraries are all meticulously documented. A cell in the women's prison, filled with light, sheer curtains, potted plants and ornately framed photographs, is more the cell of a religious than of a convict. Wardens, chaplains and their families, in the stiff formal poses typical of the era, are portrayed as moral, righteous and enlightened warders. Very few images of convicts are included, and these are usually trusties or chaplain's assistants dressed in neatly pressed striped suits.
Only in the dozen or more Mug Shots does the prisoner's reality of prison life begin to show through the neat fabric of propaganda. These are haunting, surreal double portraits using a mirror to show full face and profile simultaneously. In the mute stares of the convicted we can measure the distance between the public intentions of the prison and the private experiences of the imprisoned. Here we see not rehabilitation or even punishment, but simple cataloguing of human contents, of facts to be filed.
Lawson writes, "Power and Justice are not the same thing. Since the founding of this nation, criminal law and its application have been used to maintain economic dominance by a ruling class. Although society needs to be protected against the truly criminal act, there are thousands of laws which attempt to regulate morality and human conduct by creating criminal sanctions. American law is the extension of the influence of the ruling classes in an industrialized economic power. This is not democracy, but capitalism; crime, in part, is the result of the choice to maintain the structure of wealth and power."
Paul Pernish's photographs of the Oakland Police illustrate changes our society has undergone since the turn of the century in its attitudes toward the "thin blue line." Pernish introduces twenty large color prints as the result of a "22 month, 2300 hour, hyper-involved experience which would alter my social beliefs, my general outlook, my photography, my preconceptions of man's behavior" and which "as an artist, not a photo journalist" would "shatter my left-liberal preconceived notions of law-enforcement." It is difficult to tell with just what preconceived notions Pernish began this odyssey, but there is little doubt as to the romanticism and heroism which color his vision here. These are "art" photographs, not documentaries; they are rich and luxurious in palette, very conscious of contemporary photographic color modes, and derived from the quick cutting of film and TV action footage.
What is the purpose of an art which estheticizes the arrests and deaths of nearly a dozen black men while offering no clues as to who the men are, or what they have (or have not) done? Neither officers nor perpetrators are identified; all perform anonymous roles in ambiguous dramas without apparent cause or ultimate resolution. What are we to make of a scene in which seven uniformed officers, drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups, stand casually around a dismembered, headless corpse? What is the intention of an image in which a large white officer stands, foot on the fender of a small toy auto, "ticketing" a preteen black youth? Are we to find this scene amusing, or is the child rehearsing his adult role? Why does a young officer surrender his gun, butt first and cylinder open, to the photographer/viewer? All the miscreants are black: is this what Reagan meant by "a jungle?" Racist connotations are inescapable.
Pernish has included images which obviously intend compassion and balance, although they, too, are equivocal. In one, a derelict's bruised head is bandaged by an officer who presumably did not inflict the wounds. In another, an officer lugs a large, stuffed toy sheep from a housing project. Is the sheep a criminal, a victim, or evidence?
The position of the "combat photographer" is firmly established in photographic tradition, and has historically been problematic. In an article on police stress, The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin observes, "Many police officers hold the basic suspicion that no one really cares, and that . . . people treat them simply as a curiosity. There is some support for these beliefs. Persons in many different professions attach themselves to police offices and their work in order to share the excitement and action without accepting any responsibility." Pernish writes that he "came away much impressed, and full of respect for the difficulty of their work, and the amount of restraint, moderation, and intelligence they exhibited." What he shows us, however, is formalist disinformation which shortchanges both the cops and the others. We know nothing more, understand nothing more about any of the actors in these scenarios than we might learn flipping from channel to channel any night on TV. Pernish hoped that the images would be seen as "occupational pictures of the cop's world," but what he offers are sensational, and ultimately irresponsible, icons.
These two exhibits confront, from different vantage points, the same subject -- the definition and enforcement of society's laws. Lawson's data are researched, evaluated, and placed in context, while Pernish's impressions are offered untempered by analysis or theory, their ideology masked by the tired opposition "art vs. documentary." Ultimately, the difference between these exhibits delineates not only the poles of contemporary photographic practice, but the deterioration of our cultural belief in the worth and redeemability of the individual as social contradictions intensify. San Francisco Camerawork has begun 1982 with a provocative and significant offering.
