Imagine a man's face changing so that at any given moment he is impossible to identify before he turns into someone else. Wide features morph into narrow ones, blond hair gives way to brown, and a 5 o'clock shadow sprouts then disappears.
Sound like something out of a science-fiction novel or the next Mission Impossible?
Actually, a video by French artist Pascal Loubet offers the uncanny encounter. Together with several dozen vintage mug shots and wanted posters, this unusual piece is part of an exhibit that takes a playful swipe at ideas of identity and identification in the context of crime.
At Studio@620, The Reluctant Sitter exhibit complements the alternative art space's second annual film noir festival. The week-long event — an homage to the libidinal urges that make criminals of people and the voyeuristic ones that make them so fascinating to the rest of us — brings screenings of classic and contemporary films in the genre, including Born To Kill, Thieves' Highway, and Blood Simple. The accompanying photography show puts a real face (many faces, in fact) on underworld intrigue — and a local collector's obsession.
A few weeks ago, a panel presentation at the Tampa Museum of Art offered aspiring collectors the following advice: Find something you truly love — be it comic books or contemporary art — and start buying. Tim Welsh lives by that credo in a Gulfport house stuffed, by his friends' accounts, with the art he collects. For the photography buff, whose ever-changing collection also includes some folk art and pottery, that means everything from 1940s-'50s mug shots to turn-of-the-century daguerreotypes to black-and-white 19th-century Norwegian landscapes. Some of the pieces enter his "permanent collection," the rest wait to be sold online.
Since moving to the area a year and a half ago from the Northeast, where he taught drawing at Harvard Extension School for a decade and ran a Boston gallery, Welsh has become an active member of St. Pete's Museum of Fine Arts. Last year, he lent the museum a portfolio of contemporary British photography for an exhibit, and when staff there realized that Welsh was sitting on a bonanza of objects that could be exhibited elsewhere, they introduced him to the folks at Studio@620.
Police photography, in the form of vintage mug shots, police cards and wanted posters, is one of his many passions. (The fact that his grandfather was a Boston policeman might have something to do with it.) For Welsh, the images put a gritty twist on the conventional art-historical idea of portraiture.
From a contemporary perspective, what's most striking about some of the earliest examples, especially a book of photos from a Manchester, N.H., police department in the early 1900s, is the Sunday-best finery worn by the subjects. Clad in suits and silk with preening handlebar moustaches and fancy hats, the presumed criminals look as though they were arrested then cut loose and ordered to come back cleaned up. (Just imagine if Nick Nolte had been given the same opportunity — we'd have missed one of the most visually compelling moments of the early 21st century.)
Handwritten below or typed in later versions from the '30s, '40s and '50s, the alleged crimes of the accused make for alternately titillating, appalling and comical reading. Arson, highway robbery and murder are not uncommon. One suspect, stopped in 1955 for reckless driving and possession of a .22-caliber rifle and a club, told officers he was out looking for his wife.
The subjects' expressions — vaguely surprised, typically neutral and ultimately born of an urgent need to look as innocent as possible — are an art unto themselves. As Welsh is quick to point out, just being the subject of a mug shot implies some degree of culpability; the very format has spawned a unique genre of calculatedly guileless facial expressions, which in turn serve as a blank screen for viewers to project narratives of guilt and innocence.
In a gesture of fun and fundraising, Welsh has donated a stack of wanted posters from the 1970s to the Studio@620. Look for the roughly 6-inch-square flyers, many depicting strung-out hippies on the run for armed robbery and mail fraud, to be pinned to a wall during the exhibit. Priced at around 10 bucks a pop, they're an inexpensive invitation to catch the collecting bug.
Speaking of collections … how they'll be showcased in the new Tampa Museum of Art was fodder for discussion last week at a public forum with architect Stanley Saitowitz. About a hundred people — largely museum board members, movers and shakers within the arts community, architects and media — gathered for a Q&A session at the museum. Its cordial tone was interrupted only once by a heckler.
Saitowitz said he hopes to give some of the best spots in the new building to the museum's permanent collections in antiquities and glass, an allusion to the "substantial" donation of glass art for the new facility promised by Sarasota collectors Richard and Barbara Basch. The architect described himself as belonging to a school of thought that sees museum architecture as a frame for artwork rather than a work of art in itself, comparing London's Tate Modern to the Guggenheim Bilbao.
He talked about the necessity of constructing a building above the flood plain, which could lead to situating a garden or public gathering space under a raised museum. He also mentioned the possibility of a museum store opening onto the Riverwalk and confirmed that using environmentally friendly building materials would be a priority.
More than one questioner struggled to tactfully ask how the architect intended to introduce a modernist structure to a city that refers to one of its most beautiful downtown skyscrapers as a beer can. Saitowitz, ever charming and unflappable, replied that people have likened his rectilinear buildings to "a toaster next to a dishwasher" and still ultimately embraced them.
City Council member Linda Saul-Sena asked if there was a way to continue communicating with the architect after the forum. Saitowitz and the museum's interim director, Ken Rollins, said that now is the time to let museum folks know if you have something to tell the architect; his schematic designs are due in March.
The Tampa Museum of Art's main number is 813-274-8130.
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2007.