Mug Shots: A Small Town Noir (2014)

Summary

By Diarmid Mogg – Published April 3, 2014 Floyd M. Armstrong, arrested for loitering (and possibly stealing a roll of pennies and a box of shotgun shells) on a summer night in 1957, in New Castle, PA. Diarmid Mogg Martin Fobes woke up to the sound of officers from the New Castle police department banging on his front door. It was early on a January morning, still dark, and he was lying flat on his living room floor, where he had passed out a few hours previously. The police took him downtown and charged him with driving while intoxicated. They sat him in a chair against a white wall and slotted numbered tiles into a board behind him, to record the fact that he was the four thousand eight hundred and eighty-third person to have been processed in that room. They took a picture of his profile, then turned him to take a picture face-on. While he was held for questioning, the negatives were developed and printed on a small piece of photographic paper that had been cut with scissors from a larger sheet. The print was then taken to a room in police headquarters known as the rogues gallery, where it joined the ever-growing archive of twinned portraits of citizens unfortunate enough to have been caught breaking the law in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania. Sixty-one years later, the photograph dropped through my letterbox in Edinburgh, Scotland, in an envelope containing half a dozen old mug shots that I’d bought for a few pounds from an eBay seller who specialized in historic ephemera. Martin Fobes Diarmid Mogg I’d become interested in mug shots through a book called Least Wanted, by Mark Michaelson, which contains hundreds of these strange and beautiful little portraits, taken as a matter of routine by law enforcement agencies across America but made haunting by the passage of time. I was fascinated by the range of expressions, the haircuts, the clothes. Such faces. Who were they? What had they done? What were their lives like? Almost all of the pictures in Least Wanted are an...