One June night in Texas in 1983, Karla Faye Tucker, with her friend Daniel Garrett as an accomplice, murdered Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton in Dean’s apartment. They’d been after Dean’s motorcycle, but instead took the couple’s life with a hammer and a three-foot pickaxe. Tucker, at the time a heroin addict and sex worker, received the death penalty (as did Garrett, who died in prison). During a 14-year stint in prison, Tucker became a born-again Christian, married a prison minister, and found her faith rewarded by calls for release from Pat Robertson, Pope John Paul II, and the EU Parliament. Regardless, she was executed by a lethal injection of sodium thiopental on February 3, 1998, with a crowd of supporters and opponents outside the so-called death house prison in Gatesville, Texas.
Tucker’s face hung on the wall of the Chelsea gallery Field Projects this spring as part of photographer Amy Elkins’s show Parting Words. Elkins has long made work interrogating systems of power. For Parting Words, she spent years amassing the public records of Texas inmates put to death, collecting their mugshots and transcripts of their last words. She then selected a potent phrase from those final statements or noted their death-row refusal to offer one. An algorithm software transformed the grayscale photograph into lines of text, forcing the patterns you see in each portrait.
For the show, Elkins hung the works in three grids across the gallery walls, tight rows of mug-shot word portraits. The installation was overwhelming, suffocating, enraging. Tucker was joined by only one other woman, the so-called Black Widow, Betty Lou Beets, who murdered her fifth husband and possibly other husbands, too. The rest of the exhibition featured portraits of hundreds of men, each of whom the state of Texas murdered as punishment for their crimes since the Supreme Court allowed the return of the death penalty in 1976.
Elkins laid down some rules in making these portraits. Each is the same size, subject to the same black-and-white system of light and shade and font and kerning. The grid of them becomes at once hard to see and impossible to look away from. The eye wants to lose focus, to abstract these prisoners into objects; the mind wants to turn them into data, to number their gender and race and facial features; the heart wants to puzzle out how a man like Billy Crutsinger, the 563rd man Texas had killed as of 2019, went from the ugliness of the murder of a mother and her daughter to the beauty of his final thought: Where I am going everything will be in color. Here in the gallery, though, it’s all shades of grey.
Vasantha Yogananthan: Coming of Age in New Orleans
Friendship, love, and sadness percolate through these photographs of children at play.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City | High Museum of Art, Atlanta
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Helmut Newton: Fact and Fiction | MOP Foundation, A Coruña, Spain
Helmut Newton is a formidable influence in contemp...
Joanne Dugan
Joanne Dugan has practiced some form of meditation for about a decade – she calls it “a repetitive practice of quiet sitting,” to de-emphasize the formality of certain meditation practices and highlight its accessibility.
Photo Books that delve into MoMA’s collection, a tight-knit Maryland family, and the New York City Subways
Grace Wales Bonner, Dream in the Rhythm Henry Horenstein: We Sort of People Alen MacWeeney: New York Subways 1977
Stephen K. Schuster
Freedom Tunnel Jump, Amtrak Train Tunnels, Upper W...
Andre Wagner
Wagner’s photographs (those on view here are all pre-pandemic pictures) capture small moments of connection – children in animated conversation; a group of kids playing in the spray of a sprinkler; a woman holding the hand of a little girl, who turns around to flash an inquisitive smile at the photographer.
Amy Miller
Amy Miller, executive director of Atlanta Celebrat...
Paul Amador
Money isn’t everything. At least making more of it...
Ugo Mulas: New York: The New Art Scene at Matthew Marks Gallery
This exhibition of photographs by the Italian Ugo ...
Din Q. Le: Confronting Collective Memory
In his multidisciplinary practice, Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê addresses memory, displacement, and trauma – but also offers glimpses of hope – in works that frame individual and collective experiences of what the Vietnamese call “the American War.”