The Polk County 8

When I began this blog, I anticipated highlighting (among other things) the type of news photographs that appear in your local paper but have a pictorial resonance and an aesthetic and subtextual complexity that transcends the everyday news image. I was seeing this kind of picture regularly, but no sooner did I start blogging than they seemed few and far between.

Then this Saturday, a number of papers ran a line-up pictures by Scott Wheeler of the eight Florida teenagers accused of savagely beating a classmate in order to film the attack and put it on YouTube. Bullying has been much in the news these days, but this time it seems to have created a tipping point of revulsion and concern.

The pictures of the accused, are startling in the banality of the faces. (As is the ordinariness and imaginative spelling of many of the names – April, Britney, Brittini, Cara, Kayla, Mercades, Stephen, Zachary.) A number of the girls look surprisingly similar, but minus the prison garb, they could just as easily be reacting to a berating for poor schoolwork. The boys, who were posted as lookouts while the girls carried out the beatings, are a little closer to looking like they might be heading to jail.

The pictures are fascinating in the narrow range of emotion they convey, from self-pity to sullenness, but all stop before genuine contriteness. (I’m reading this in, of course, but I have a hunch I’m right.)

Andy Warhol would have loved these pictures as I imagine would Gerhard Richter. (They have similarities to Warhol’s “Most Wanted Men” paintings as well as some of Richter’s early depictions of the Baader Meinhof gang and the eight student nurses killed by Richard Speck.)

Sadly, these are a group of pictures and a story that truly speak of our time.