Time is of the essence today, so why not a quick look at a mugshot archive?
All these images are from HIDDEN FROM HISTORY. UNKNOWN NEW ORLEANIANS:
“The people grouped here may have had nothing in common except that their lives intersected with the municipality at least once. This exhibit brings them together in part to show how the city classified them. The documents and photographs here are therefore not representative of those New Orleanians who lived their lives quietly and within the law; they are necessarily skewed toward those who erred or strayed, who got caught or got in trouble, or, conversely, those who actively sought assistance from the city.”
The images were selected from the Louisiana Division/City Archives. My favourites here are those photographs in which intriguing, strong(?) communication persists.
– – –
The exhibit was curated by Emily Epstein Landau and funded in part by the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program (1999), a program of the Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Ford Foundation. Dr. Landau received her doctorate from Yale University in 2005. Her dissertation, “Spectacular Wickedness”: New Orleans, Prostitution, and the Politics of Sex, 1897-1917, is a history of Storyville, the famous red-light district. She will be teaching New Orleans history this Spring, as a visiting lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park. She lives in Washington, DC.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 15, 2010 at 7:30 am
Recent Archives – 12th Press
[…] wonderful archive of African American photographs from the 1900 Paris Exposition. In addition, Pete Brook just posted a link to Hidden From History: Unknown New Orleanians with some phenomenally […]
January 7, 2011 at 2:48 pm
Portraits, not Mugshots « Prison Photography
[…] collection is very similar to a set of mugshots from the archives of the Louisiana Division/City Archives in New […]
July 23, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Arresting Portraits of Bygone Criminals (or how we can all gawp guilt-free at ‘the Other’) « Prison Photography
[…] Unknown New Orleanians […]
October 11, 2013 at 2:49 pm
Kateri Maloney
Is there anything known about the photographer? Were they developed in the department?
Thanks!
Kateri
October 13, 2013 at 12:27 pm
petebrook
I have not found out anything about the photographer. It is most likely the photographs were developed by the police/jail darkroom.