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CANDID CAMERA
NOVEMBER 17, 1997NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT |
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Essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service considers an unusual photo exhibit in San Francisco.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: After Lady Diana, the most photographed woman in the world, died in Paris a few months ago, everyone blamed the paparazzi. But consider the camera, itself, that little black box that most of us own and use to freeze the brightest moments in our lives--the laughing baby, summer vacation, newlyweds, birthdays in old age. Here at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art a most unromantic exhibit--police pictures--examines the darker uses of photography. On these walls you will not find photographs in search of beauty or pleasing sentiment.
Here the camera's focus is on evil--how to arrest it. In the 19th century the invention of photography immediately attracted the interest of police agencies in Europe and America. Long before photography was considered an art form, the camera was enlisted as a tool to fight crime. Crime scenes and evidence were photographed--before there was DNA, before there were fingerprints, there was the face on the "wanted" poster. And police departments had a rogues gallery; the mug shot--one frontal, one profile--dates to the 19th century. These faces peer out to us now. What do you suppose that boy was guilty of? Or this woman.
Influenced by Charles Darwin 19th century criminologists took their cameras into insane asylums, looking for clues to the abnormal. Popular then was the belief that criminals looked different; their heads are differently shaped from the rest of us. From that 19th century notion came the terms "low brow" and "high brow." To the Victorians the camera was a scientific tool, neutral, unbiased. Even today that presumption survives. A contemporary photographer like Richard Avidon, for example, regularly is praised by critics for exposing some inner truth about his subjects, as though the camera could only tell the truth.
On the other hand, once O. J. Simpson was arrested, the editors of Time Magazine decided to darken his photograph, rendering him less familiar to us. The cliche of every cop movie, every Cagney and Bogart film, is the blinding flash of the detective's camera at the scene of a murder. Look at these oddly beautiful past murder scenes from the 19th century--almost like sets from an opera. Imagine the flash that created these photos. Something about that flash reassures us--tells us that life can be cast on mystery, the crimes solved. In the 1800's the camera went into places that law-abiding citizens have never seen, like the shadowy opium den. The camera allowed us to venture into the dark. There are today television programs in America that filmed police officers arresting people. Doors open and the camera's light floods the shabby room.
The century--the tabloid press was preoccupied by the mobster. It was Capone or Dillinger Americans saw over breakfast. No shot was more popular than the photo of a mobster killed. Today it is not the criminal who interests the tabloid photographer so much as the celebrity. Big money goes to the photographer who can catch the misbehaving movie star, or find the politician or the royal in an unguarded moment. What we have learned in recent months is that a fierce aggression lurks within the otherwise innocuous camera. Lady Diana had been the most famous woman in the world ever to have been photographed to death. We consider these Islamic women--forced to remove their veils by French colonial police cameras--before being moved to Algerian resettlement camps--or consider these faces in Cambodian prisons.
The Khmer Rouge aims the camera at those it will soon kill. And yet, most of us are comforted by the camera at the ATM machine, or the camera in the parking lot after dark. Many Americans are pleased that there are infrared cameras in our border with Mexico, that help stop illegal movement. Cameras, after all, can see in the dark, arrest the dark of a human soul--we think--we hope.
I'm Richard Rodriguez.
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