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Created Equal
In America, the chasm between rich and poor is growing, the clash between conservatives and liberals is strengthening, and even good and evil seem more polarized than ever before. At the heart of this collection of portraits is my desire to remind us that we were all equal, until our environment, circumstances or fate molded and weathered us into whom we have become. Los Angeles- and New York-based photographer Mark Laita completed Created Equal over the course of eight years; his poignant words reflect the striking polarizations found in his photographs. Presented as diptychs, the images explore social, economic and gender difference and similarity within the United States, emulating and updating the portraiture of Edward Curtis, August Sander and Richard Avedon. This volume includes an introduction by noted culture writer and editorial cult figure Ingrid Sischy.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 23, 2013
Please don't misunderstand my rating of this book. 1 star = did not like it. The photographer is skilled, shooting such quick photos and developing large plates is difficult, and Laita does great work. Unfortunately, there is a lot more going on with this book.
This collection reeks of unexamined privilege. As I turn the pages, I feel like I'm engaging in poverty and disaster tourism, and the ablist, marginalising, and shaming slant to the naming of the photo plates is disturbing- (how many photos are there of inbred relatives are there in this book? why are so many of the women undressed or portrayed as objects belonging to others?) as disturbing as the little girl dressed in white (Trick or Treater) opposite the pedophile and rapist (Pedophile). For all that the introductory essay describes this as "Laita's America is the melting pot come to life. It is a place of palpable diversity where anything can happen, and polar opposites live on the same street", it is a remarkably nondiverse collection. Additionally, knowing there is purposeful placement of these diptychs makes this all the more upsetting.
--
As a side note, the story of secrecy involving getting to photograph the KKK members in Mississippi comes across as very disingenuous as their full names are listed with their photograph.
--
Of the 210 photographs:
70 feature women - this includes 3 people identifying as women, but credited as men (eg. Cross Dresser, Brad "Tammy" Mercier) 2 photos of the same young woman (Ballerina Carrie Lee Riggins), 2 photos of the same woman (Stripper and Shopper Bianca Paris), photos where a man is the center of the photo and women are nameless accessories (Pimp Andre "King Boo" Holden with unidentified women, Man with Mail Order Wife, etc.) and there are a lot of these...
22 feature people of color - 8 feature people engaging in illegal activity (drugs use, theft, prostitution, etc.), 3 feature women alone (Indian Girl, Crack Whore, and Baptist Churchgoer), 2 are children.
15 feature children - 1 black, 1 hispanic, 13 white; 1 is pregnant
This collection reeks of unexamined privilege. As I turn the pages, I feel like I'm engaging in poverty and disaster tourism, and the ablist, marginalising, and shaming slant to the naming of the photo plates is disturbing- (how many photos are there of inbred relatives are there in this book? why are so many of the women undressed or portrayed as objects belonging to others?) as disturbing as the little girl dressed in white (Trick or Treater) opposite the pedophile and rapist (Pedophile). For all that the introductory essay describes this as "Laita's America is the melting pot come to life. It is a place of palpable diversity where anything can happen, and polar opposites live on the same street", it is a remarkably nondiverse collection. Additionally, knowing there is purposeful placement of these diptychs makes this all the more upsetting.
--
As a side note, the story of secrecy involving getting to photograph the KKK members in Mississippi comes across as very disingenuous as their full names are listed with their photograph.
--
Of the 210 photographs:
70 feature women - this includes 3 people identifying as women, but credited as men (eg. Cross Dresser, Brad "Tammy" Mercier) 2 photos of the same young woman (Ballerina Carrie Lee Riggins), 2 photos of the same woman (Stripper and Shopper Bianca Paris), photos where a man is the center of the photo and women are nameless accessories (Pimp Andre "King Boo" Holden with unidentified women, Man with Mail Order Wife, etc.) and there are a lot of these...
22 feature people of color - 8 feature people engaging in illegal activity (drugs use, theft, prostitution, etc.), 3 feature women alone (Indian Girl, Crack Whore, and Baptist Churchgoer), 2 are children.
15 feature children - 1 black, 1 hispanic, 13 white; 1 is pregnant
January 14, 2021
I was looking forward to this book but ended up being very disappointed. This book attempts neutrality in an America defined by power and privilege. Of the 280 people captured here, 81 are women, 3 are trans folks, and 37 appear to me to be BIPOC. More men than women are defined by their profession. Of the 81 women, 16 are sex workers, and several others are defined by their bodies in other ways - teenage pregnancy, 2 models. 23 of the women are photographed with men. Very few of the BIPOC folks are defined by their profession, and many of them are depicted as gang members, sex workers, or similar blue collar work. Other aspects of visible diversity are nonexistent or very limited. What America did this white male photographer even visit?
August 19, 2013
This collection of diptych portraits nails the point home that we're not all that different from one another. Examining the images, finding the subtle and not-so-subtle similarities between the subjects leads you on a journey that's quintessentially American. Priests and prisoners, polygamists and pimps - some of the pairs are disturbing, some hold a rhythm and a beauty found solely in their togetherness. Great reminder of how everyone has a story - and that story may not be what it first appears.
December 31, 2024
It was a wet and rainy day yesterday, too wet for me to ride my bike, so I walked to the university library. One of my Instagram friends reminded me of the Youtube channel Soft White Underbelly, and I was on the way to check out the channel owner's first book. My friend directed me to videos about The Whittakers, a family of inbred and deformed people with varying levels of mental competency. Mark Laita, behind the camera in the video, speaks with them, asking them questions, to which one family member, Ray, barks in response. Yes, like a dog. Mark's voice audibly trembles as he asks them questions, which is understandable given that apparently their neighbors pulled guns on him when he originally showed up. Over the course of the video, I felt my response shift from fear and disgust to pity and warmness, eventually learning to laugh along with Ray's nonverbal jokes. A remarkable kindness emanated from the family, even showing through their treatment of the many dogs on their property, all of which seemed well-behaved and well-cared for.
At the start of the video, he mentioned he had featured the family in this book, so I wanted to see it for myself. When I found the book, I was surprised by how large it was. I genuinely had forgotten that coffee table books even existed. Each image is about a foot wide by a cubit tall, and they're all in black and white. The preface, an essay written by Ingrid Sischy, is mostly forgettable. The contents of the book are not. The presentation, however, could use some work.
Laita has laid out diptychs, or two images facing each other, taking up the entire page. Immediately I noticed a contrast between this and Richard Avedon's work in Nothing Personal, which featured regular disparities between the sizes of images on the right and left pages. The choice of varying sizes versus uniform sizes is a political one: Avedon and Baldwin are not afraid to acknowledge the disparities in privilege and power between their subjects, and they often feature white supremacists and racists as larger than life. One particular photo of Neo Nazis has them taking up two whole pages, and another, of the racist Leander Perez, is extremely zoomed in. These contrast sharply with Laita's portraits: all formal, head-on, equally-sized, sometimes feeling quite staged (the subjects usually carry tools of the trade, often held conspicuously within frame). Even this book's title, Created Equal, is a cliche, which should have tipped me off about the uninspired framing of its contents.
Ultimately, I'm conflicted with Laita's approach. It's important to show these images, but I think he does a remarkably bad job at it. At the bottom of each image, he gives a title (which he came up with), the subject's name (if they provided it), the location, and the date. This means the 'only' input from the author is that single line of text, as well as the choices of which pictures he pairs together. I understand that his intent was to ennoble the subjects he photographed, but his survivor guilt / white-liberal politics lack the nuance you'd hope from someone who has had so much contact with so many diverse groups of people. He calls all of the Native Americans "Indians." He calls one African American woman a "Crack Whore." Almost every image of African Americans is juxtaposed with a KKK or Neo Nazi member.
Note that I'm not making the same complaint as the top two low rated reviews here on Goodreads. Both of those stupidly waste time counting the race and gender of people in the book, which completely misses the point. This book isn't trauma porn; it definitely contains its fair share of traumatized people, but rather than reveling in their trauma, it instead negates it by pairing them with a "successful" or "clean" or "normal" person. Too many of the image pairings have a straightforward, sometimes groan-inducing logic behind why they were paired. For example, a new Marine about to go off to war and an old Vietnam vet with no legs. Or, a pair of Amish teenagers and a pair of punk teenagers. Too often, any nuance is lost by Laita's straightforward, linear juxtapositions. In Nothing Personal, the pairings vary from straightforward to opaque. The variation causes that book to be vastly aesthetically superior, whereas the homogeneous tone of this book threatens at every turn to make it cliche.
The photos all are certainly technically well done, but they lack any feeling. A wide array of body types, levels of undress, and employment can be found, but too often they're paired in cliche ways, like a cold Wisconsin couple all bundled up, next to--you guessed it: two nudists. I can't help but think that removing the captions entirely would have helped this book immensely. The last section of the book features miniatures of the photos with the original caption and sometimes an additional blurb about where or how the photos were taken. Without the titles next to the images, some of them might have been less straightforward, such as the assisted suicide patient next to the holocaust survivor. With the titles present, all interest is removed. Suddenly, we have a neat, clean explanation for why the two are next to each other. Without that pesky caption, we might have to do the difficult legwork of analyzing the images to see what they have in common and what differentiates them.
Speaking of this last section, I noticed a couple of images, both of naked women, which were missing from the main body of the book. When I was checking the book out of the library, a notice came up which said 2 pages were missing. I didn't think anything of it, and I figured the missing pages wouldn't be missed. When I got to the end with the miniature photos and expanded captions, I suddenly understood why they were missing. Perverts. Ironically, the pairings that resulted from the missing pages felt much more interesting than the majority of Laita's hackneyed cliches. They forced me to ponder what the two had in common and what they lacked. Those sorts of pairings were my favorite: ones where I got a chance to analyze thick, manual labor hands versus vascular, thin hands; or ones where I read the lines in one's face like a book, versus the virginal flatness of another's youth. These aesthetic juxtapositions were vastly more interesting to me, but unfortunately they were uncommon.
This has been a strange experience. Over the course of writing this review, I lowered the star rating from 4, to 3, to 2 stars. The more I thought about what Laita was doing with these photos, the more frustrated I became, because I don't think he's all that good at this. Sure, he's empathetic to these people and apparently gives them some money for their time, but his politics seem comfortable and smug, like the Pharisee instead of the Tax Collector. The main problem with this book is best understood in contrast to his Youtube videos: in the videos, his subjects have a voice, even if it's unintelligible. In this book, his subjects are silenced, used as pawns in a cliche political game. One especially boring pairing is a CEO with a janitor. The most interesting pairings were the least political: ones where people happened to pose in ways which mirrored each other, or where people shared surprising facial similarities despite being unrelated. If Laita had approached this with more of an aesthetic focus and less of a (lazy) political agenda, the whole thing would have been much more successful. Oh well.
At the start of the video, he mentioned he had featured the family in this book, so I wanted to see it for myself. When I found the book, I was surprised by how large it was. I genuinely had forgotten that coffee table books even existed. Each image is about a foot wide by a cubit tall, and they're all in black and white. The preface, an essay written by Ingrid Sischy, is mostly forgettable. The contents of the book are not. The presentation, however, could use some work.
Laita has laid out diptychs, or two images facing each other, taking up the entire page. Immediately I noticed a contrast between this and Richard Avedon's work in Nothing Personal, which featured regular disparities between the sizes of images on the right and left pages. The choice of varying sizes versus uniform sizes is a political one: Avedon and Baldwin are not afraid to acknowledge the disparities in privilege and power between their subjects, and they often feature white supremacists and racists as larger than life. One particular photo of Neo Nazis has them taking up two whole pages, and another, of the racist Leander Perez, is extremely zoomed in. These contrast sharply with Laita's portraits: all formal, head-on, equally-sized, sometimes feeling quite staged (the subjects usually carry tools of the trade, often held conspicuously within frame). Even this book's title, Created Equal, is a cliche, which should have tipped me off about the uninspired framing of its contents.
Ultimately, I'm conflicted with Laita's approach. It's important to show these images, but I think he does a remarkably bad job at it. At the bottom of each image, he gives a title (which he came up with), the subject's name (if they provided it), the location, and the date. This means the 'only' input from the author is that single line of text, as well as the choices of which pictures he pairs together. I understand that his intent was to ennoble the subjects he photographed, but his survivor guilt / white-liberal politics lack the nuance you'd hope from someone who has had so much contact with so many diverse groups of people. He calls all of the Native Americans "Indians." He calls one African American woman a "Crack Whore." Almost every image of African Americans is juxtaposed with a KKK or Neo Nazi member.
Note that I'm not making the same complaint as the top two low rated reviews here on Goodreads. Both of those stupidly waste time counting the race and gender of people in the book, which completely misses the point. This book isn't trauma porn; it definitely contains its fair share of traumatized people, but rather than reveling in their trauma, it instead negates it by pairing them with a "successful" or "clean" or "normal" person. Too many of the image pairings have a straightforward, sometimes groan-inducing logic behind why they were paired. For example, a new Marine about to go off to war and an old Vietnam vet with no legs. Or, a pair of Amish teenagers and a pair of punk teenagers. Too often, any nuance is lost by Laita's straightforward, linear juxtapositions. In Nothing Personal, the pairings vary from straightforward to opaque. The variation causes that book to be vastly aesthetically superior, whereas the homogeneous tone of this book threatens at every turn to make it cliche.
The photos all are certainly technically well done, but they lack any feeling. A wide array of body types, levels of undress, and employment can be found, but too often they're paired in cliche ways, like a cold Wisconsin couple all bundled up, next to--you guessed it: two nudists. I can't help but think that removing the captions entirely would have helped this book immensely. The last section of the book features miniatures of the photos with the original caption and sometimes an additional blurb about where or how the photos were taken. Without the titles next to the images, some of them might have been less straightforward, such as the assisted suicide patient next to the holocaust survivor. With the titles present, all interest is removed. Suddenly, we have a neat, clean explanation for why the two are next to each other. Without that pesky caption, we might have to do the difficult legwork of analyzing the images to see what they have in common and what differentiates them.
Speaking of this last section, I noticed a couple of images, both of naked women, which were missing from the main body of the book. When I was checking the book out of the library, a notice came up which said 2 pages were missing. I didn't think anything of it, and I figured the missing pages wouldn't be missed. When I got to the end with the miniature photos and expanded captions, I suddenly understood why they were missing. Perverts. Ironically, the pairings that resulted from the missing pages felt much more interesting than the majority of Laita's hackneyed cliches. They forced me to ponder what the two had in common and what they lacked. Those sorts of pairings were my favorite: ones where I got a chance to analyze thick, manual labor hands versus vascular, thin hands; or ones where I read the lines in one's face like a book, versus the virginal flatness of another's youth. These aesthetic juxtapositions were vastly more interesting to me, but unfortunately they were uncommon.
This has been a strange experience. Over the course of writing this review, I lowered the star rating from 4, to 3, to 2 stars. The more I thought about what Laita was doing with these photos, the more frustrated I became, because I don't think he's all that good at this. Sure, he's empathetic to these people and apparently gives them some money for their time, but his politics seem comfortable and smug, like the Pharisee instead of the Tax Collector. The main problem with this book is best understood in contrast to his Youtube videos: in the videos, his subjects have a voice, even if it's unintelligible. In this book, his subjects are silenced, used as pawns in a cliche political game. One especially boring pairing is a CEO with a janitor. The most interesting pairings were the least political: ones where people happened to pose in ways which mirrored each other, or where people shared surprising facial similarities despite being unrelated. If Laita had approached this with more of an aesthetic focus and less of a (lazy) political agenda, the whole thing would have been much more successful. Oh well.
November 7, 2012
Great Portraits, awaome printed. Must have for Photo intrested
June 17, 2022
A modern day Diane Arbus.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews