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The Innocents Photographs and interviews byTaryn Simon Introduction by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck Designed by Joseph Logan for Baron & Baron Umbrage Editions, New York 104 pages; 43 photographs; $34.95
Witness Iraq: A War Journal February-April 2003 Edited by Marcel Saba Designed by Yolanda Cuomo powerhouse Books, New York 208 pages; 135 photographs; $35
"In the case of Marvin Andersen, convicted of rape, forcible sodomy, abduction, and robbery, the victim was shown a photographic array of six similar black-and-white mugshots and one color photo. The face that stood out to the victim was the color photo of Anderson. After the victim picked Anderson from the photo array, she identified him in a live lineup. Of the seven men shown in the photo array, Anderson was the only one who was also in the lineup. Marvin Anderson served fifteen years of a 210-year sentence."
Marvin Anderson was innocent. So was Troy Webb, convicted on the basis of a four-year-old photo (the current one made him look too old for an eyewitness, so the police provided a version taken when he was younger). As was Ronald Cotton, who was identified as the assailant by a rape victim because he "resembled the photo, which resembled the composite, which resembled the attacker. All the images became enmeshed to one image that became Ron, and Ron became my attacker."
As photographer Taryn Simon explains in her documentary volume, The Innocents, DNA testing exonerated these men years, sometimes decades, after being wrongly incarcerated. The woefully inadequate functioning of law enforcement and other institutions-with their lost records, misplaced evidence, and refusals to grant requests for DNA testing-in many cases prolonged their jail time. Image, too, plays a major role in misidentifying these men, who are predominantly poor and mostly Latino or African-American. As Simon asserts, "This project stresses the cost of ignoring the limitations of photography and minimizing the context in which photographic images are presented. Nowhere are the material effects of ignoring a photograph's context as profound as in the misidentification that leads to the imprisonment or execution of an innocent person."
Then why produce a book of photographs with a premise that seems to assail photography's capabilities? Or, more pointedly, why photograph each of these recently released people, in...