The age of 'Innocents'

Photographer Taryn Simon's "The Innocents," at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, should piss you off. These large color portraits of 22 people released from death row after being cleared by DNA testing began as an assignment for The New York Times Magazine in 2000.

Simon traveled around the country documenting the men and one woman who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and managed to persuade many of them to pose in the spots where they had been plucked without warning and dropped into as many as 18 years in hell.

That project prompted Simon to investigate the criminal justice system's flawed use of photography. A quote by a crime victim, printed in the exhibit's brochure, eloquently explains how her participation in identifying her attacker through photos and creating the composite drawing led to a false arrest: "I picked out Ronald because, subconsciously, in my mind, he resembled the photo, which resembled the composite, which resembled the attacker. All the images became enmeshed in one image...."

These poignant photographs can be admired for aesthetic reasons, but they can't be divorced from their contexts and so, in this way, "The Innocents" becomes political art. As images, they present strong arguments for reform. The subjects of these environmental portraits, shot in ordinary places where their otherwise ordinary lives were disrupted, are living testaments to a failed system.

We see Frederick Daye posing with a bottle of beer in the American Legion Post where he was arrested. It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for Daye, who served ten years in prison, and the others to return to these locations. This is photojournalism touched by a fine artist's sensibility of composition, color and light. In the bird's-eye view of Tim Durham (who served three and a half years), taken in an Oklahoma skeet shooting field, Durham appears to be floating with his rifle above the hundreds of busted clay disks that at first glance look like a huge patch of red flowers. There is an education room with a video of interviews of the subjects; newspaper clippings, including the excellent Chicago Tribune series on the death penalty; and books, including a catalog of Simon's complete project. In that book there is an image of James O'Donnell, who is shown holding a police sketch of the perpetrator, who might look more like some of us reading this than it does him.

Simon has stipulated that the captions for each photograph run in full when they are reproduced, and so, in image after image, the number of years lost begins to jump out. It's a monstrous thievery and begs the question: If our criminal justice system can get it so wrong, what business does it have enacting something like the Patriot Act?

For visual disturbances of another kind, the museum also presents the work of Eirik Johnson in "Borderlands," a collection of jarringly beautiful, untitled landscape photographs of trashed environments.

Because of their formal elegance, these appear to be soothing images. But upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that they're not shots of Eden. The seemingly calm stream under a canopy of tree branches in one image reveals itself to be a long scrap of a discarded carpet. Johnson is fond of the places where worn tires accumulate and underground spaces where water collects. Like "The Innocents," this is an exhibition of bleak environments, but an important one to experience firsthand.

"The Innocents" and "Borderlands" are at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and run through October 1.