From the phenomenal site Information is Beautiful. Click for full size.
Reading the gem of a text that Photography Prison dug up from a Lester Morrison interview on 5b4 that I somehow missed…
In my sophomore year I started doing psychedelics in a rather serious way. Some friends got hold of a bunch of Sandoz tabs. Sandoz was the only pharmaceutical outfit ever to produce pure lysergic acid diethylamide-25 and ergotamine in a form that looked like Pop-Rocks. Ergotamine comes from a fungal rust that grows on certain cereal grains. In high doses can cause vascular stasis, thrombosis and gangrene. That’s how my buddy Ben lost his foot and resulted in me having extreme panic attacks that forced me to drop out of school. Well, that and the foul cholera episode. When it isn’t turning you into a leper, the ergotamine slots so perfectly into the complex serotonin metabolism of the primate cortex. Brings about some random stochastic happenstance, some entropic slippage where – although you have the taste of cat piss in your mouth – you also find yourself trying to poke out the eyes of god. The morning after my first trip, I finally understood colors.
… Brings to mind the color wheel you see above and also Albert Kahn.
In other news, I’m currently engaged in a book project with a photographer who learned to shoot in the 60s – It’s in b+w, but it really gives me a tremendous idea of how printing preferences have shifted over the years. That is to say that, to a certain extent, you can judge when an image was printed by the particular balance of contrast and density that seems to shift through the decades as printing fashions (!) ebb and flow…
Nick. Whoooa! These are really cool. Washington State Reformatory is the prison in which I volunteer teach. It’s in Monroe about 40 minutes from Seattle.
In fact, tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the institution. It is the second oldest prison in Washington.
I’m going to be badgering you for follow ups and delivery of an awesome project to the wider web world!
I wonder how the mugshots got to Paris?
Weird coincidence – I figured these would be of interest to you, Pete, but I never made the connection to the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe.
As far as the broader collection, the rest of the work isn’t mugshots, but rather a much broader collection of other found photos. I’m going to do my best to get the project out, but as I said in the post, I probably shouldn’t even have posted these as I’m not even sure how public they want the work to be.
As far as how they got to Paris, your guess is as good as mine, though I imagine these were widely handed out at the time, and they’ve probably made their way all over the place. I love also that the text is handwritten on the back of two of them – I guess, though, that this was common enough, or widely distributed enough, to necessitate actually printing on the back of the cards..
ADD A COMMENT »
Tags: Mugshot
Posted in Found Photo, On Shadow