The Design Police

Now that cell phone cameras are a ubiquitous part of everyday life, it may come as no surprise that not everyone need be a professional photographer to publish their work. There’s an engaging pull to the kinds of photographs that emerge from on-the-fly shooting: they’re all about a kind of instinctual compositional impulse that connects a fleeting instant with an enduring watchfulness. Sites like Flickr have taken this kind of street-photography to a new level, making it public and international and curatorially self-governing. Still, underneath it all there’s an implicit assumption that the people posting their photos are artists, or designers, or photographers, or students — people who have the time not only to shoot pictures but to post them.

But somewhere in Southwest Atlanta, there’s a law enforcement officer taking pictures, chronicling the everyday with photographs (many of them from the patrol car) of a world few graphic designers ever see. And it’s incredible.

They’re remarkable, these photographs — shots of streets and run-down housing projects; of gang graffiti and street signage; still-life images of gleaming handcuffs and rows of bullets, shot like some metallicized kind of alternate life-form, an aberrant kind of techno-horticulture. The images themselves are laid out plainly on a simple grid, but even here, the relationship between the cropped indexical version and its full-frame version indicates an artist with a capable reach as well as a steadfast editorial sensibility. The images themselves are delicately composed, warmly lit, strikingly bold. Taken individually, they’re visually arresting, but as a series, they take on a kind of secondary narrative — daytime on the outskirts of Atlanta, where there’s a kind of dormant energy, an apprehensive sense of imminent peril. It’s as if the very cropping of these images makes a kind of statement: is trouble what’s beyond the viewfinder? And if so, do the pictures themselves offer a kind of visceral, even spiritual respite from such menancing unknowns?

Of course, many of us shoot what we see in the world everyday — signage and graffiti, shadows falling on abandoned buildings: none of it is new, exactly. But these pictures —and this site — were produced by a cop: and there’s your tertiary narrative right there. It’s an astonishing thing to see: now just think about what we’re not seeing.