Least Wanted: A Cen­tury of Amer­i­can Mugshots, is a pho­tog­ra­phy book by graphic designer Mark Michael­son. Punks, sneaks, mooks and mis­cre­ants. Hook­ers, stooges, grifters and goons. Men and women, elderly and ado­les­cent, rich and poor, but mostly poor. These are the Least Wanted. Their por­traits make up a small part of Mark Michaelson’s col­lec­tion of over 10,000 Amer­i­can mugshots from the 1870s to the 1960s.

You can also go to Michaelson’s Flickr site where you are going to find lots of these beau­ti­fully infa­mous portraits.

I love mugshots as an art form, there is some­thing sexy about them; any­one who has ever had to pose for one of this, car­ries the curse and mark of Cain for the rest of their lives. Dur­ing my brief failed attempt at pho­tog­ra­phy school, tak­ing mug shots of reg­u­lar peo­ple was one of my projects that never came to fruition. I wanted to stamp as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble with the mark of Cain.

How­ever, despite how much I love these pic­tures, the sto­ries they tell and their his­tor­i­cal value, there is also a dark side to it.

A few months ago while pay­ing for gas at a ser­vice sta­tion I was shocked when I came across a lit­tle tabloid called ‘Just Busted’. You’re likely to see them in almost any con­ve­nience store each week and it’s loaded with mugshots–pictures of peo­ple charged with every­thing from D-U-I, to child sex, to assault, to tres­pass­ing, even murder.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle at the Huff­in­g­ton Post, to gaze at this unlucky faces is a uniquely Amer­i­can pastime. In all Michaelson’s time hunt­ing — in Euro­pean flea mar­kets and online — he’s never come across a mugshot in cir­cu­la­tion that orig­i­nated out­side the U.S., where they are con­sid­ered pub­lic property.

It sounds to me like Fas­cism though. Euro­peans and spe­cially Ger­mans got a good les­son when they decided that some minori­ties deserved a less than human treat­ment and it was the allied forces that put a stop to the mad­ness. So, allow­ing this type of witch hunt­ing hys­te­ria in the US sounds to me like decline, decom­po­si­tion, degra­da­tion and I don’t like it at all. I know Amer­i­cans are far from per­fect and have also com­mit­ted injus­tices against minori­ties in the past but I think they are bet­ter than that. I hope so. Peo­ple must come to their senses.

In this news video, an attor­ney named Jerry Sum­mers says that the fact that any­body can go to jail and get mugshots in a news­pa­per that will sell for a dol­lar, cer­tainly infringes upon the rights of the accused under the 6th amend­ment to have a fair trial.

OK, now that I’ve vented it and taken it out of my chest, let me tell you also about Amer­i­can Mugshot, a fea­ture doc­u­men­tary film explor­ing one of the most intrigu­ing phe­nom­ena in Amer­ica, the crime-related genre of mug shot pho­tog­ra­phy and its influ­ence on con­tem­po­rary cul­ture. In this doc­u­men­tary, Mark ana­lyzes his com­pul­sion for col­lect­ing old mugshots.

I ask you to please take a look at the teaser trailer of Amer­i­can Mugshot below:

Also, here’s a lit­tle excerpt of the lyrics of the Trial sec­tion of the musi­cal The Wall, that I love:

“The evi­dence before the court is incon­tro­vert­ible, there’s no need for the jury to retire!
In all my years of judg­ing, I have never heard before some­one more deserv­ing of the full penalty of law!
The way you made them suf­fer, your exquis­ite wife and mother, fills me with the urge to defe­cate!
Since, my friend, you have revealed your deep­est fear
I sen­tence you to be exposed before your peers.

Now, do your­self a favor and watch Alan Parker’s movie “The Wall’ FULL