California Penal Code Section 622 states the following: Every person, not the owner thereof, who willfully injures, disfigures, or destroys any monument, work of art, or useful or ornamental improvement within the limits of any village, town, or city, or any shade tree or ornamental plant growing therein, whether situated upon private ground or on any street, sidewalk, or public park or place, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
The first time I exhibited any of my photographs was in April 1985 at the Northlight Downstairs student gallery at Arizona State University. it was a small space near the darkrooms but it had lots of traffic and great visibility with my peer group. It also gave me my first experience editing and sequencing an exhibition. I exhibited some early images from my Pasadena Police Department series , which to this day is still my strongest body of work.
I began photographing the Officers of the Pasadena Police Department during Spring Break in 1985 as a class project while studying at Arizona State University. My father was a well-respected Reserve Police Officer, and he arranged the opportunity. I rode with Sergeant Tom Oldfield the first night who was one of my dad’s close friends. Being a Sergeant, Tom had the ability to respond to any interesting call to try and get me as much action to photograph as he could. The most eventful thing was a woman named Tina Hart who committed suicide in the middle of a street by shooting herself. The rest of the week I rode with individual officers and photographed whatever incidents they were involved in. When my professor, Tamarra Kaida saw my early images she realized how good the series was and encouraged me to continue photographing the department beyond the class assignment. Another professor, Bill Jenkins (best known for curating the important New Topographics exhibition) also liked the early images in this series. Bill gave me some outstanding advice when he suggested I start using a wide-angle lens to photograph this series. Initially I had used a 50mm lens and in some instances, I had stood back from incidents to stay out of the way. Bill explained that using a wide-angle lens would force me to get closer to my subjects and make the images more powerful. The combination of putting on a 35mm lens and gaining more trust from the officers I was photographing to my images to another level. Using wide angel lenses has helped me capture most of my best images.
During the first few weeks of the summer of 1985, I started to develop good rapport with most all the officers. I knew how to stay out of the way and not let my photographing interfere with their job even though I was usually making exposures at night in low light conditions using a large off camera flash. I would make prints for the officers, and everyone liked seeing photographs of themselves working. Early in the summer of 1985, I become a Level 3 Technical Reserve Police Officer, which allowed me to volunteer in Police Department’s own photo lab most days before going on ride a longs with officers at night to photograph. It was an ideal situation because it gave me darkroom access while I was away from ASU.
One day I noticed a large empty bulletin board in the main hallway of the Police Station. The area had lots of foot traffic, department personnel as well as public visitors. I recognized the bulletin board could be a decent gallery space to showcase my photographs. I figured my photographs would be good for department morale as well as having a public relations benefit for public visitors. I asked for permission to turn the bulletin board into a gallery and it got approved. The photograph above it from the first group of prints I exhibited. I tried to change out images on a regular basis to keep interest.
I named the space the P.C. 622 Gallery to discourage any of the officers from adding comments to the prints or vandalizing them. Being around the officers I knew how much banter and teasing went on. Lockers were routinely written on highlighting recent exploits or mistakes and I knew officers started doing similar things to my photographs I would lose the space. I searched the Penal Code for sections which would cover that and discovered P.C. 622 which specifically covered destroying or defacing artwork. For the year plus the gallery was up we only had one instance where a print was written on and that was when the group of prints were not changed out for three months during a spring semester. I came across the above photograph of the gallery this week while organizing files and decide to share the story of the gallery. I also think this post also pairs well with my post on the opening of the exhibition at the Atlanta Airport Exhibition space this week, I, like most photographers, always enjoy seeing my photographs exhibited in traditional gallery and museum spaces, But I also love showing my images and prints in non-traditional spaces that have high traffic volume. There is always value in having images seen and experienced by others, especially in print form.
