La gatera de Beguemot

The New York Times called the pictures “a catalog of the human face and the things that can happen to it.” But Michaelson is interested in the photographs as pop artworks, too, à la Andy Warhol. To that end, he has blown some of them up to poster size, stamped them with a number and signed his name. A gallery in Rome was scheduled to exhibit those works this past month.

He has also posted a portion of his collection on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr.com, where people discuss and rate photographs. Responding to a shot of a thin-faced, exhausted-looking Minneapolis woman arrested in 1963, one commentator wrote, “She looks [like] a mean one, doesn’t she?” Another said, “That’s some serious Minnesotan crossbreeding.” And another: “We can tell by her lack of make-up, oral hygiene and feminine charms that it most likely wasn’t hooking.” Reading the comments, one gets the feeling that Michaelson’s mug shots encourage a kind of voyeurism, which doesn’t always bring out the best in people.

Durante décadas Mark Michaelson coleccionó “mugshots”, fotos de detenidos (no se me ocurré la traducción ahora mismo; no sé si en un país en el que el Estado nos tiene fichados desde que nos sacamos el DNI y tiene nuestra foto y huellas existe esa práctica) y ahora ha sacado un libro y montado una exposición. Lo veo en MeFi, y hay una interesante búsqueda por hacer en Flickr de más fotos como ésta. Sin embargo, no creo que supere la intensidad de ver a los dobles de Mink Snopes, Lucas Beauchamp, Joe Christmas…