Artist Paints Mugshots As Catholic Saints To Ponder Criminal Justice
MONTCLAIR, N.J.— New Jersey artist Nora Murphy wanted to get better at painting faces for portraits, so she started sketching old mugshots from Alcatraz, the notorious federal prison and island off the coast of San Francisco that closed in 1963.
“After a couple of sketches I got to one of this guy with these really penetrating, hypnotic, beautiful eyes, and I thought, ‘this would be a perfect saint,’” she said. “When I flipped the card over, the information about the prisoners was on the back of the cards, and it was Al Capone.”
She recoiled at the idea of beatifying the gangster. Then she started thinking about all the other mugshots out there.
“I got sucked into the idea of, like, this mugshot, and this person and this story,” she said.
That fascination led Murphy to create a series of portraits that blend Catholic iconography with mugshots, representing arrestees as different saints throughout history that she matched to the suspects’ expressions and imagined personalities. The idea is that saints were criminals in their respective eras, and societies change where they direct their moral outrage over time.
Selections from “Mea Maxima Culpa: Mugshots and Martyrs,” are available on the website of Clerestory Fine Art, the gallery that hosted the exhibit.
Murphy chose images from a book of anonymous vintage mugshots that her husband had been given as a gift. She flipped through them, imagining people whose lives were interrupted, their images captured and documented at an unhappy moment.
She reflected on her initial impression of Capone’s expression, and how it evoked imagery of Catholic sainthood that had been imbued in her psyche since her childhood in a devout Catholic and politically liberal home in rural Ohio.
When Murphy said to her mother that the saints were criminals in their respective eras, “she got so upset with me.” But they weren’t just persecuted; they were prosecuted, Murphy said. There were often trials. They were punished, imprisoned and, frequently, killed.
“So the Catholic response right off the bat has been defensive from a lot of people,” she said, “until they talk to me and realize that I am doing this with -- these things are precious to me too. These ideas and these stories are precious to me.”
She chose to not use any photos of people who were young and more recent. Most of those she selected were taken in the first half of the last century.
Both mugshots and images of saints are easy to breeze past, she said. Despite the often dramatic stories that led to each depiction, it’s easy to miss the full humanity present in them. Mugshots tend to reduce a person to a sad or awful moment of their lives. Saints are known for their stories, but as icons their suffering is “literally gilded in these statues, and you don’t notice the details,” Murphy said.
For example, the figure of St. Lucy with a knife stuck in her neck is carried through the streets during the feast that bears her name. It’s easy to forget that Lucia of Syracuse was a real person, Murphy said. She had parents. Tradition holds that she was brutally executed, a sword thrust through her neck, for refusing to marry a wealthy man who was not Christian.
It was an acceptable punishment according to the norms of her time and place, Murphy noted. That’s the point she tried to illustrate with these portraits — what a society deems moral and immoral, and the suffering it confers upon those it judges as wrong, are often seen as misguided and cruel when the political winds change. These shifts leave untold tragedies in their wakes.
Micah Danney is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Brooklyn and a 2019-2020 Poytner-Koch reporting fellow and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for the GroundTruth Project.