vallierojas: A rogue gallery for the rioters

Exhibiting pictures in this way reveals a desire to classify the world, collect it, put it in categories ? including moral ones

The faces began to appear as soon as the courts got stuck in. By late Wednesday, newspapers were showing galleries of accused rioters on their websites and the following morning, when David Cameron was due to address parliament, the Daily Telegraph printed a row of three pictures of the accused under the headline "Our sick society".

Another grouping of photographs on the Daily Mail website was titled "A rogues' gallery", and showed a grid of photographs of men charged in court. In the Guardian too, a story on the fast-track court proceedings is accompanied online by a triptych of three of the accused.

Newspapers, like the courts, are trying to assimilate a lot of information very fast. These groupings of riot portraits are an effective way to stress the sheer number of people being prosecuted. Eerily, the pictures of defendants arriving at and leaving court, or pictures of happier days pulled from their Facebook pages, give individuality to fragments of what was originally a faceless crowd. The grid arrangements, meanwhile, stress the bigger story of collective outrage that links them all. But there is more to it than that.

"Our sick society": the Telegraph headline said it all. Its front-page display of three faces was inviting readers to contemplate moral decay. The faces of a white 11-year-old boy with his face blanked out, a white 19-year-old woman whose father is a company director and a black 31-year-old man who works in a primary school ? in that order, from left to right ? were exhibited as specimens of the "sick society". What does this mean? How can photographs reveal the moral state of anyone, let alone a category of people, or a society?

The instinct to exhibit these pictures in rows, galleries and grids originates in our mental habit of classifying the world, collecting it, putting it in categories ? including moral categories. This is how the mind makes order from chaos. The genre of the typological portrait ? a collection of people with something in common ? is part of that instinct and originates in early modern Europe when every ruler kept a cabinet of curiosities, a collection of the world. The palace of the Medici in 16th century Florence had a cabinet of rare wonders while the nearby government offices ? the Uffizi ? boasted a vast gallery of portraits of famous men.

Portraits of the great and the good are one thing, but it was the Romantic age that turned the genre upside down and started to collect portraits of the outcast, excluded and condemned. The most moving such portraits are Th�odore G�ricault's paintings of "mad" people such as The Kleptomaniac, done as a series in the 1820s at the request of the psychologist �tienne-Jean Georget. The stage was set for the birth of photography. The cool eye of the camera proved perfect for compiling vast collections of criminal faces, deviant faces, anarchist faces, all pictured in the same pose and displayed in a vast grid to be studied by policemen, psychiatrists, physiognomists and cranial measurers.

The 19th century definitely thought it could see "sickness" in a face. The man who invented criminal photography was Alphonse Bertillon, in 19th-century France, whose systematic method of portraying the criminal type ? full frontal and profile ? is the origin of the modern mugshot. Bertillon's technique was taken up by American detectives and police forces where his grid displays of criminal faces got the name "rogues' gallery". The useful practical side of Bertillon's technique has endured in modern policing, but it would be naive to see him as an objective scientist of crime. The vast collections he created of deviant portraits, including political subversives, fed the fantasies of an age that believed mental conditions were inscribed in the shapes of faces and skulls.

So here we are, with the new rogues' gallery of the UK's 2011 riots, as newspapers compile their collections of the socially and morally outcast. Do conservative rhapsodists really believe we can look at these pictures and see a moral nightmare? If so, we need to resurrect 19th-century ways of looking at the human face. We need to scrutinise these people for signs of "degeneration", for muscles whose saggy disunity betrays a loss of moral control, for brutal brows that signify murderous passion, eyes that reveal a sly madness.

In reality, the Daily Mail shied away from such archaic beliefs. All it could muster, as an analysis of its rogues' gallery, was to say that one man looked just like a character in the underclass-caricaturing television drama Shameless. Next, they'll be saying one of the looters is planning a Fat Gypsy Wedding. Indeed, how soon is it before looters start telling their tales in the press?

For the great, pregnant moment of Us and Them that crystallised this week will never hold. The sense of a morally upright majority united against the "scum" will not last. The way the photographs of rioters and looters have been handled reveals the impossibility of sustaining a Cato-like moral condemnation of the rioters. Already by the end of the week, the grids and galleries of rogues with their invitation to diagnose a category of deviant personality were giving way to more detailed portraits of strange individual stories. The tales emerging from the courts seemed wildly various and fragmented, impossible to see as one single strain of moral sickness. The moral decision made by a man who took a case of water from a looted shop is simply not the same as the moral decision made by someone who committed arson or murder.

The Daily Telegraph's arrangement of three pictures of people of different ages and class backgrounds was intended to show that social and economic factors cannot be blamed for the riots. These people do not share the same social context ? ergo, they must share something else, a moral failing. It is a powerful argument ? for a moment. But as soon as you follow that very logic, looking for common moral threads, you face exactly the same problem that undermines easy economic explanations. It is just as hard to see a common ethical story as a common social story. Rightwing columnists blame the riots on fatherless families, but the well-off parents of 19-year-old Laura Johnson, one of the first rioters to have her named photograph published and one of the Telegraph Three, both supported her in court.

Photographs reveal very effectively how meaningless the moral interpretation of the riots actually is. As more information came in, the very conservative papers pushing the moral line started showing more and more ordinary visual details of ordinary British lives ? from a teenage athlete involved with the Olympics to incredibly thin boys who, if the pictures came from another country, we might have no trouble calling hungry-looking.

Andy Warhol saw through the moral iconography of the rogues' gallery. In 1964 he decorated the New York pavilion at the World's Fair in Flushing Meadow with a silkscreen mural of the faces of 13 Most Wanted Men. Warhol's wanted men are mugshots of gangsters issued by the FBI ? but his insidious eye saw eroticism and fascination in their pictures. The outcast are desirable, suggests Warhol, the criminal is sexy. He undermines the barrier between right and wrong so effectively his mural was painted over because it seemed to ? and did ? glamorise crime. But in doing so it pointed out the obvious, that all images are ambivalent and all human life an enigma.

Jonathan Jones

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