About Face

What do you get when you encounter one thousand photo portraits without wall labels? A sea of faces, staring down at you, their histories veiled. At Pier 24’s About Face exhibition, I felt a bit like I was people-watching in an airport—anonymous and deprived of any background information about the objects of my gaze.

The saving grace? Several of the twenty galleries contain an additional ingredient: textual cues embedded within the photographs themselves. A couple of the series in About Face especially piqued my interest because their narrative elements made me feel more involved with the subjects and less like a voyeuristic bystander.

The series of photographs, Mugshots, Anonymous, Washington State, 1915–1923, that Danny Lyon collected, appear to be original police documents that include criminals’ vital statistics, nationalities, occupations, and criminal careers. The defiant gaze of a French woman called Edna instantly caught my attention. Edna was arrested for prostitution on April 14, 1915. From the remarks column, we learn that she had dressed as a boy at age 16 and worked for several months as a messenger boy. One can only imagine what Edna, who also called herself Maud and sometimes Charlie, had to do to make ends meet. Through these narrative cues, viewers’ relationships to the subjects go beyond speculative and objectifying to become relational and personal.

Anonymous, collected by Danny Lyon. Mugshots, Anonymous, Washington State, 1915-1923 (detail); mounted photograph, wall-sized installation; Courtesy of Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco. Photo: Leora Lutz.

Jim Goldberg’s Rich & Poor series (1985) portrays seemingly random citizens with their thoughts scrawled onto their images. “My wife is acceptable. Our relationship is satisfactory,” dryly states one Edgar G., while his wife gushes, “Edgar looks splendid here. His power and strength of character come through…We are totally devoted to each other.” Again, the addition of text makes this work come alive. Goldberg’s portrait subjects become very real. Viewers have the opportunity to engage on a deeper level with the work, beyond spectatorship.

I missed the wall texts that typically accompany works in an exhibition setting. Each contextual and historical bit of information personalizes art and draws viewers into the conversations between the artists, their subjects, and the curators and exhibition designers. In About Face, access to this conversation is largely denied. Viewers are forced to take the portraits at face value. The words that artists and their subjects wittingly included whetted my appetite for deeper engagement.

About Face is on view at Pier 24 Photography, in San Francisco, through February 28, 2013. 

Maureen Burdock is an internationally exhibiting artist and graphic novelist.