‘Invisible People’ Exhibit Pierces the Soul

Be forewarned. Step into the Museum of Photographic Arts’ “Invisible People” exhibit, through May 8, at your own peril.

Ruth Morgan’s blunt, 4-by-4-foot prints of San Quentin felons will pummel you with magnum force, and Jim Goldberg will pierce you to the depths of your soul with his silent scream of an exhibit, “The Nursing Home Series.”

Morgan brings startling visual evidence of a hopeless subculture that is part and parcel of our criminal justice system. Sure, we’ve read about prison life, but seeing it is something else.

Titled “San Quentin: Maximum Security,” Morgan’s photographs portray life in prison as a racist cult of the tough guy. The large-scale black and white prints convey the compression of tiny cells and seethe with the tension of these bulky inmates who while away their time pumping iron and tattooing themselves.

As for race relations, there is no black and white together. Prisoners are segregated by race, an arrangement that allows prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood to flourish.

The look in the eyes of these men is defiant, challenging. But Morgan also captures their humanity.

While a bare-chested youth stretches on his bunk, Morgan’s lens picks out the snapshot of smiling young wife and infant.

Someday, this man and the others will return to their families.

The question raised by Morgan--who isn’t against punishment--is how men can enter prison and “come out better than when they went in.”

Goldberg’s aging residents of nursing homes are also comfortably removed from public view. After Goldberg made their portraits, they gave him their handwritten thoughts about their lives to accompany some of the photographs.

The pained look in the eyes of an aged mother being visited by her two daughters meshes with her pitiful note that she fears she has become “like a baby” to her children.

A wasting hulk of a man in a wheelchair comments that “Time goes by slow. It’s agonizing. No one notices me. I’m an invisible person.”

Then there is plucky, 86-year-old Yvonne, still “an independent woman,” and the jaunty woman in warm-ups who writes back to Goldberg: “I shake my fist at death.”

This exhibit sharply juxtaposes the spirit of these aging residents with the withered features society views as an aberration of normality.

Another exhibit of nursing and retirement home photos, these of local residents, will be shown this weekend at the American Society on Aging’s national conference in San Diego.

San Diego photographer Molly Low’s collection, titled “Images of Aging,” includes 36 black and white photos, along with written reactions from the subjects similar to the Goldberg exhibit at MOPA.

“Images of Aging” will be on view beginning Saturday afternoon and continuing through Monday at the Town and Country Convention Center in Mission Valley.