内容简介
Punks, sneaks, mooks and mi screants. Hookers, stooges, grifters and go ons. Men and women, elderly and adolescent, rich and poor, but mostly poor. The se are the Least Wanted. Their portraits make up a small part of Mark Michaelson’s collection of over 10,000 American mugshots from the 1870s to the 1960s. Created as utilitarian instruments, and meant to be destroyed when obsolete, they survive as remnants of a byg one era of hard-copy originals, extra ordinary visual windows on the past, and riveting physical artifacts, often accompanied by municipal ephemera. They are glued to cards and manu scripts , typed on and rubber stamped. Each suspect has been measured and fing erprinted, documented and classified. Bored, sheepish, pro ud, coy, tough, defiant, bounced, bloodied, bruised, broken and innocent faces--innocent until proven guilty--stare back at the camera with unmistakable individuality. This is central casting for the Late Late Show of unvarnished reality, and the lineup is full of small- tim ers, those who have fallen through the cracks. Each subject, each image , is a person, a portrait, a trace, a crime, a clue, a moment, an express ion, a frame, a mustache, a mother, a father, a son or a daughter. Each image is evidence, documentation. A record of people and of stories dismissed by history and rescued here. A century of American soul s, file d and forgotten, until now. Contributors include Ian McEwan and New Yorker contributor Malcolm Gladwell.
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