Against Mug Shots

By Piper FrenchAugust 12, 2021

Against Mug Shots

Ethical Portraits: In Search Of Representational Justice by Hatty Nestor

AS THORNY AS the debate over ethical representation can be, the notion of ethical representation in the context of the US penal system might appear so controversial as to stymie debate entirely. The American prison is a site of simultaneous hypervigilance and social invisibility. Imprisoned people are constantly “seen” by the state and its agents but hidden from sight to their community, denied the sort of image-making that occurs casually and naturally between free people. Instead, they are captured by surveillance camera footage, court sketches, facial recognition technology, mug shots. The judgment these images confer is immediate; it allows no due process.

In the foreword to Hatty Nestor’s new book, Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice, Jackie Wang writes that given the challenges of representation, particularly the representation of imprisoned people, it would be easier to abandon the effort entirely, to look away. Wang contends, however, that to do so would only exacerbate the “social abandonment” that people in prison experience. Nestor’s book is a brave attempt to write from the center of that uncomfortable contradiction, to argue that an ethics of representation is possible — under certain conditions.

Ethical Portraits also functions as a brisk survey of the previous literature on representation, empathy, and the image, taking up Susan Sontag, Janet Malcolm, Sara Ahmed, Emmanuel Levinas, the political scientist Naomi Murakawa, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and Wang herself, who wrote Carceral Capitalism. Having something new to say about the ethics of representation is a big task, and Nestor’s book doesn’t really advance the theoretical questions at play here — it’s almost hard to imagine how you could at this point. But her use of source material — a series of art projects featuring people caught up in the criminal legal system — is valuable, even fascinating. Ethical Portraits works as a sort of kaleidoscope: approaching its central question from all angles, refracting different representational strategies back at each other.

Though people in prison do have access to some forms of self-representation (cell phones, while not permitted, are common, and the artistically inclined can draw, as a friend of mine did voraciously while held in ICE detention), there are heavy restrictions on their ability to create and share images. Nestor’s project, then, is explicitly about how artists who are not imprisoned contend with the complexities of representing people who are: the choices they make, their consciousness of their duty, and how and why they fail.

Nestor makes the good choice to expand her inquiry beyond only people who are actively trying to “ethically represent,” including some of the very people who do the state’s image work. Courtroom sketch artist Priscilla Coleman’s “portraits” are completed under the exacting demands of the criminal legal system; their narrative capacity is constrained by logistics — she completes most within 30 minutes after the hearing — and, of course, their purchasers. She has a latent consciousness of her role in all this: “I worry about making them look guilty,” she tells Nestor. But her sympathy extends mostly to her imagination of the other’s vanity; she tries to show their “best self” by avoiding angles that produce double chins. And, as Nestor details, Coleman exclusively depicts trials with news value (read: famous or rich participants). No tabloid will pay for an illustration of someone being cast into the criminal legal system over a few unpaid parking tickets.

Nestor’s discussion of Prison Landscapes, a photo series by Alyse Emdur, is powerfully affective. It also unifies her project. Prison Landscapes shows prisoners posing, sometimes with their loved ones, before visiting room murals painted by imprisoned artists. It is the most realist representation of imprisoned people to be found in the book, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most ethical, of course. As Nestor observed in a recent interview, “it often wasn’t the images themselves that could foster empathy or function equitably, but the context of their production and intentionality.”

But something about these images articulates a series of representations bound up in care: for the paintings painstakingly created, for the fleeting proximity to family, for the opportunity to be perceived in relation to something other than prison walls. The distance created by Emdur’s camera is mediated by her association with the photos. She developed the concept after coming across a photo of herself, at five, posing with her imprisoned brother in front of a beach scene, and collected the photos only after substantial correspondence with the people depicted in them.

Prison Landscapes is singular in another respect. Its use of foreign, even mythical landscapes makes it one of the only pieces in this series that gestures beyond the prison rather than merely attempting an ethical representation within it. In this, it is quietly abolitionist. “Of all the prison portraits and artistic projects I’ve encountered, Emdur’s pose the possibility of a feasible momentary escape,” Nestor writes.

The question of “good art” is not often explored here, and indeed, much of this art is kitsch, the courtroom sketches especially. The quality of the portraits varies, and some of the landscapes are crudely done. Does that matter? Wang, whose brother is also imprisoned, writes of the prison landscapes: “I had always been put off by these cloying backdrops when visiting my brother in prison […] [a]nd yet I could not ignore the fact that my brother loved these photos.”

Nestor has a good eye for contradictions and absurdities; at times, I wish she’d linger on them. Chapters are short and move swiftly. Often, she discards a genuinely interesting observation to move onto the next point.

The book’s two chapters on Chelsea Manning are a good antidote, exploring different representations of Manning in significant depth. In the first chapter, which was previously published in Frieze, Nestor considers the official portrait of Manning, which the Chelsea Manning Support Network commissioned to counter the two extant depictions of the whistleblower at the time: army photos of Manning before she transitioned, and a selfie in a blonde wig that she sent to her army supervisor to assert her true gender identity.

To continue to circulate the first was its own act of violence against Manning’s now publicly stated gender expression. The second was a private photo taken and sent in a moment of desperation, which Manning never wanted to become public. The portrait that artist Alicia Neal eventually created shows Manning as she wanted to be seen: as a woman in control of her identity and appearance.

The final chapter returns to Manning in an interview with the contemporary artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who created cyborgian 3D prints of Manning based on her genetic material. The project was a subversive response to the state’s use of forensic technology, which Nestor explores in the previous chapter on forensic sketch artists and the perils of algorithmic policing.

As she’s well aware, even the alternate forms of representation that Nestor explores in Ethical Portraits are substitutions for a lack. When my friend was released on bond from ICE detention in March this year, after nearly two years in a cage, the first thing he did after calling me was send me a photo of his face. Reading those chapters on Manning, I thought of the proliferation of images available now: her voluble Twitter presence, selfies of her smiling, wearing lipstick. “Today, Manning’s face is everywhere,” Nestor writes. With the distance of years, it’s almost difficult to remember when that one stolen photo was her only public image. I don’t see her official portrait circulating anymore; these days, there’s no need for it.

It is no coincidence that Ethical Portraits spends more time considering Manning’s case; there’s simply more material. As a white, trans woman, Chelsea Manning is hardly the average prisoner of the US state; the specific facts of her case make her an exceptional one. She was hypervisible to the American public in a way that the poor Black and Latino men who disproportionately populate the US prison system will never be. This hypervisibility was hardly benevolent, and it was in part a function of Manning’s transness, but it also produced the conditions for artists like Neal and Dewey-Hagborg to create representations of her that challenged the state’s images.

Manning is free now, able to navigate her self-expression. Millions of others remain imprisoned. True representational justice will mean finding ways to counter the prevailing images of them too.

¤


Piper French is a writer living in Los Angeles.

LARB Contributor

Piper French is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has done refugee solidarity work in France and Greece and worked with migrant farmworkers in her home state of Vermont. Her writing has been published by The New Republic, Roads & Kingdoms, and Asymptote Journal. Follow her on twitter at @pipersfrench.

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