Physiognomy and the Love of Mankind
Alcatraz Island
Everyday Revolution

The point of departure for the Love of Mankind exhibition was the photographic work of the F64 Group which, more than any other artistic movement, helped to construct the image of the American West in the national consciousness. The central image in the exhibition was a photograph of the Prison/Morgue in Ballarat, California, a ghost town on the outskirts of Death Valley, which stood as a subtle reminder that, though rarely pictured, these landscapes were rarely as barren as they appear, and were often the sites of great human tragedy: Indigenous communities, explorers, settlers, criminals, and even murderers roamed these lands which lay outside the boundaries of civilized society. In the exhibition, the Jail/Morgue served as a transitional marker between the front room in which familiar images of a barren or "empty" landscape, gave way to a second gallery, which desplayed a series of simple lines drawings derived from human profiles, and playfully emulated a system of character analysis developed by Johann Kaspar Lavater in the 1780s; A system with which he believed he could determine the moral character of any individual, and which would later influence criminologists, social Darwinists, and even artists like Messerschmidt (pictured above) throughout the eighteent and nineteenth centuries. Like searching for meaning in the shifting patterns of sand, these deeply flawed ideological models influenced everything from romatic literature, to the education of artists in the academy, and even the criminal justice system. It was this exploration which led me to produce a series of images on Alcatraz Island. I have also included images of two earlier works, which thought not directly related to the exhibition in question, did make reference to Los Angeles' own history of race riots. These particular works were included in an exhibition entitled, "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutiony Life" for which I assembled found images from various race riots and combined them with my own images from one of Los Angeles greatest wild fires.

In 2008, I recreated Lavater's eighteenth century device designed for drawing, and ultimately studing, the human profile. Entitled, "A sure and convenient machine for making silhouettes," there is no evidence to suggest that Lavater ever actually built it. Its design predates the photographic camera by less than a half a century and it was concieved as a device for obtaining the "truth" of the human figure --as revealed in the angles of the forehead (Lavater believed). However, unlike the photographic camera, this strange device relied on "shade" or shadows to make its images. In his day, Lavater made the same claims for the objectivity of his machine that later scientists would make with regard to photographic images, and of course, of their favorite form, the mug shots or profile.