Traveling Back Along the Tracks of Time

Crime raises its hypnotic head in two traveling exhibitions at Loyola’s Laband Gallery. “Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue: Photographs by Eugene Richards” documents the crack cocaine epidemic in three purgatorial inner cities. “California Prisoners: A Rediscovery of Historical Criminal Portraiture” presents a series of vintage mug shots. Both, supervised here by gallery director Gordon Fuglie, are accompanied by absorbing books.

The exhibitions function as mordant concrete poetry about the human animal under duress. We’re reminded that crime is a relative matter. A poverty-stricken crack addict is a criminal. A rich Prozac habitue is admirably controlling his emotions.

Richards is a veteran photojournalist for Time and Magnum Photos. Tracking the crack phenomenon for years, he reveals a romantic concentration on the individual. Somehow gaining intimate access to his subjects, resulting shots impart a visceral sense of what it must feel like to be high. A tight close-up shows a woman clenching a syringe between her sparse teeth. Her eyes convey an expression of godlike power.

An interior down-shot of a kneeling boy catches his head wreathed in smoke as if dissolving in ecstasy. We’re reminded of 19th century European drug experimenters like poets Charles Baudelaire and Samuel Coleridge. Richards’ style, however, reminds us that ghettoized African Americans and Hispanics aren’t aesthetic dilettantes.

Photographs are displayed with transcriptions of interviews and Richards’ commentary. The combination, so to speak, fuses individual shots into a single large cultural panorama of North Philadelphia, Brooklyn’s Red Hook Housing Project and East New York.

We’re shown arrogant young dudes with expensive Nikes, gold chains and .357s. They’ve opted for what seems the sensible solution to a hopeless situation--go with the gang and deal. Desperate addicts shoot up. An anti-drug rally brings out a crowd of pushers. They’re worried that a small showing will tip authorities to how bad things really are. A prostitute explains the way she plies her trade to support her habit.

Decent folks carry on with a nice wedding in the midst of blight. Somebody gets shot in a turf dispute. Then there’s a nice funeral and the whole thing starts over. When a dealer gets busted the neighbors laugh.

Richards imparts the eerie understanding that all this is simply an adjustment to the local economy. Basically, these underground pits are company towns that traffic in an illegal substance. By the most basic laws of survival there is nothing abnormal going on. If the economic base isn’t changed, the misery, degradation and death will continue.

Lives Captured at a Telling Moment

“California Prisoners” grew from a project by New York photographer Arne Svenson. It presents the opus of Clara Smith, a turn-of-the-century commercial photographer from Marysville who specialized in identification shots of accused criminals. Lovingly reassembled by Svenson, pictures are accompanied by trial reports from local newspapers.

All subjects are male and predominantly white, with a sprinkling of blacks and Asians. Most stand accused of petty theft, then quaintly called “petit larceny.” With their bowlers, bow ties and dopey expressions, they look like something from a nostalgia-sodden movie like “The Sting.” The mind is inclined to behave like a casting director. Hmm. That James Donald fellow looks a little like Clint Eastwood, so he can be the misunderstood hero. It’s a game Smith’s images won’t let us play. Her portraits are too specific and fundamentally sympathetic for stereotyping.

Which is not to say that at some level these guys aren’t acting. Basically, they have the demeanor of trapped animals. Arrested, stripped of dignity and mobility, confused and disoriented, they clutch at a countenance to cover naked confusion. Donald goes for stoic. Charles Russell combines cockiness with menacing charm, as if he’s trying to seduce the photographer. William Heron’s blue Irish eyes beg us to believe he’s just too nice and stupid to break the law.

The single most poignant image is labeled “Claude F. Hankins, Murder.” The only mark on him that conforms to notions of a killer is a scar on his cheek. Aside from that, he looks like the tired, scared, homesick 14-year-old he was. The picture gloomily recalls a recent string of homicides by adolescents and children.

Then, as now, reports of Hankins’ 1904 trial reflect deep concern about the just way to deal with such a young defendant. Misgivings notwithstanding, Hankins was found guilty of second-degree murder and spent five years in San Quentin.

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* Loyola Marymount University, 7900 Loyola Blvd.; to Oct. 3, closed Sunday through Tuesday. (310) 338-2880.