For Lynn Novick, photographs offer a window into the past that the written record cannot quite replicate. They’re “evidence of something that existed in front of the camera” at the moment the shutter clicked, the documentarian told me recently.
At the same time, photographs are not entirely neutral; someone chose where to stand, what to include and what to leave out. This tension is one of many we touched on in a recent conversation on the imagery of crime and punishment that Americans have been creating and preserving for centuries.
Novick, her partner Ken Burns and their team encountered roughly 16,000 such images in the process of producing a forthcoming documentary on the history of the American justice system, whittling it down to nearly 1,400 images that made it into the four-part series.
The Marshall Project’s Jamiles Lartey asked Novick to look closely at 10 images from that archive and share thoughts on what they can tell us about the system, the people who’ve encountered it, and ourselves in the process. The Q&A that follows has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Image 1
How did these very unique mug shots — very different from what people generally expect — come to be?
Lynn Novick: So, these photographs were taken by a woman named Clara Sheldon Smith in a town called Marysville, California, right around 1900. She was a professional photographer with a studio. So people could go there for a wedding portrait or family portraits. And for reasons that we don’t quite understand, the town of Marysville hired her to photograph people who were arrested.
By this time, most police departments would photograph people when they were arrested, but she didn’t take the pictures of these people the way they would have been taken if they were taken in the jail. They were brought to her studio so they now have, in a sense, the same relationship to the camera as anyone else who is getting their picture taken. And that shows in the way that she photographed them with an enormous amount of humanity and dignity.
What’s the value in seeing mug shots this way?
So in the film we showed some of the pictures without seeing what the person was accused of. Then sometimes we would add it. We thought it was interesting to have ourselves and our audience just think whatever they would normally think when you see a picture of someone … and then see what they’ve been charged with. And then you have to kind of think about the relationship between those two things.
Image 2
Why was it important to include internment in this film about the history of crime and punishment?
We put it in because it raises a lot of questions about what is a crime, and who is a criminal. These are people essentially being incarcerated, not because of something they’ve done or a crime they’ve committed but because of who they are.
There’s a dignity in that photograph. And I wonder, when you’re selecting photographs to tell a story, how do you think about, on the one hand, the value in showing people’s dignity and their humanity, but on the other hand, not letting the abject cruelty sort of slink by us, because there’s something so visually almost normal about an image like this — at least until you notice that the children are literally tagged.
We think a lot about how much time we spend on a picture like this. How we frame it, what music you’re listening to, what we’re saying. We’re trying to give the audience a chance to really see it and recognize that these are people.
I think we often “see the universe in a grain of sand,” as William Blake said. You can understand those 100,000 people [taken to internment camps] by seeing this one family. Where, if we showed you 100,000 people, it would just be a mass, and you wouldn’t really be able to get it.
Image 3
Many people know, at least loosely, about the era of “convict leasing,” after slavery officially ended, where many Southern states enacted vague minor laws like “vagrancy” and used them to force freed Black Americans into labor. But I’d never seen an image like this of children apparently caught up in that system. What do we know about this image and how it came to be?
I wish we knew more. We know it came from the Detroit Publishing Co. They sent photographers all over the country to take pictures of, just, American life and then they sold the pictures. So it wasn’t because, “We’re doing a story on children in convict leasing.” It’s just, “Here’s a picture of life in the American South.” I struggle to find words to go along with what was the impulse for taking this picture and selling it.
Since our knowledge about this image is limited, what do you take from spending time looking at it?
Their relationship to the camera is quite profound. It’s hard to tell how old they are. Some of them look like maybe they’re 12. The way they’re looking at the person who’s taking their picture and at the camera — I feel that they’re presenting a rebuke or a challenge.
I struggle to find an adjective, but I urge your readers to take a lot of time to look at this picture and look at their faces.
Image 4
This is a picture of a place that is formally described as a “school,” where we see young people in what you might describe as the height of captivity. What does this tell us about the tension between care and control?
In our history of incarceration, we have tilted much more toward custody and control than any kind of care at all. And we often tell ourselves that we are doing something that is, in theory, constructive for the people that are inside these places. That we’re going to help them.
And that was not new as of the 1990s, right?
No — The first juvenile institution in America was created in New York City in the 1830s, and it was called the House of Refuge.
The name suggests that’s going to be a place where you would be safe and taken care of. And it was filled with young children, boys and girls who were largely immigrants or people of color. And this place had promised to provide them with education, instruction and discipline. And to some degree that did happen. But it was also, according to people who were sent there, a place of torture and torment and forced labor.
Image 5
What does the architecture here tell us about the rationale and philosophy behind incarceration as we know it today?
The idea of a prison was to separate people in their own space so that they wouldn’t have too much contact with each other. And they would therefore be alone, “in their own head,” and they could reflect on whatever brought them here and read the Bible, pray, and otherwise think about how they can do better next time or when they leave.
That was sort of the ideal, if you will. And prisons experimented with extreme isolation where you would be in your cell all the time. And that was shown to be pretty damaging to people. So they kind of came up with a compromise: The prisons were built so that people could be isolated in their cells at night. And then during the day, they would be able to leave, and they would be forced to work.
And then you had to be counted; you had to be moved around the facility by the keepers. And basically, you see the roots of all of the things we recognize in contemporary prisons being codified in the 1820s and 30s when these institutions were starting to be built.
Image 6
In the documentary, you look a lot at the public fascination with crime, and part of that is the American mythology around outlaws. Tell me more about why these two men became famous — indeed, infamous — as criminals in the ways that they did.
Post-Civil War, there were many people in the area where Jesse James was operating who were not happy with how the war turned out, and who didn’t feel that the elites were at all concerned about their lives and livelihood.
And James claimed to be a Robin Hood, who’s the archetypal outlaw. But Robin Hood steals from the rich and gives to the poor, at least in mythological terms, and that’s not what James was doing. But he claimed he was, and that resonated for a lot of people.
Al Capone, I would say, looms as large in the 20th century as Jesse James in the 19th in our understanding, maybe even more. There’s a lot of overlap here in that he also cultivated a public image and a public persona. He loved to be in the newspaper. He liked to have his picture taken.
Image 7
Everything we’ve looked at so far has really had to do with men and boys. How did society think about women in terms of crime and punishment in these early days of this system?
The women who got caught up in the system and ended up incarcerated were treated almost worse than the men. They were viewed as incorrigible, because for a woman to break the law or commit a crime, it was seen as such a breakdown in the social order.
Men can make mistakes — not all men — but nonetheless. For a woman, though, you were a fallen woman, you were of low moral standing, you were going to destroy your family and infect your children with your bad behavior. These are the ways that women were portrayed, so they had a very, very hard time when they were locked away and there was no special understanding of women’s lives and women’s needs at all.
Image 8
As many readers will know, in the late 1960s, there was intense unrest in cities around the country over the poor conditions of Black neighborhoods. How did policing factor in?
There were enormous tensions between the police and the policed, and many times there would be an incident of police brutality and it would be the last straw, or there would be a rumor of police brutality, and people were just fed up and exhausted. They would rise up, and there would be a crackdown. And I think you’re seeing all of that in this photo.
In the wake of that moment, President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned a report that rejected a lot of the aggressive militarized response that followed that unrest. Almost 60 years later, the police are much more militarized — I mean this picture almost looks quaint by comparison to how many protests are policed today. So what happened?
There was a real debate about what the right thing to do was. The Kerner Commission represented a liberal-progressive perspective that we need to address the social problems and conditions that are underlying all of this. And at the same time, there were a lot of people saying, “We need law and order. We don’t want to see this anymore. We don’t feel safe,” and those voices won out, I’d say. We saw a nationalization of crime policy at that time, and we’re still very much dealing with that today, and that tension hasn’t gone away.
Image 9
Both moving pictures and execution by electrocution were very young technologies in 1901. What does it tell us about our cultural appetite that Edison felt it would be important, or at least profitable, to reenact this event and charge admission for people to watch it?
I think it’s the fascination with punishment and with retribution, and the public wanting to see it done and have their curiosity and their desire for vengeance satisfied.
There’s also perhaps the desire from the point of view of the public and the prison authorities to see that the punishment could be administered in a way that would not cause enormous pain and torture to the person.
There had been at least one badly botched electrocution by this point, right? So there may have been a desire to see what it looked like?
Yeah. The electric chair was really promoted as a humane method of execution that was painless. And in the film, that’s how it’s portrayed.
Image 10
When you were selecting images, why was it important to include images of ordinary life, ordinary activity, and not only violence and punishment and deprivation?
I think this picture is a bit unusual and that oftentimes the images we see put us at a distance as opposed to bringing us in to try to imagine what the people who are behind bars are experiencing.
To me, this picture just reminds us that people will look for connection. And it helps us to — if we haven’t been — remember that these are people just like you and me. And what would we want to do if we were stuck in there?
