Awful Magnificence: Infamy, Mortality, and Armchair Spectacles

The emergence of the infamous celebrity—the famous criminal—coincided with the development of modern criminology, print culture, rapid urbanization, and visual technologies that provided authorities with novel means of surveillance and control. The popular notion that one could read personality characteristics into a portrait of a lover or a friend carried powerful implications for how the public approached mug shots and other images of criminals. In this context, Americans were relearning how to see—and San Franciscans were at the forefront of this change. They devised a new system of visual spectacle and surveillance that would influence a wide cross section of visual cultures, from the external marks of class to criminality to celebrity—and those categories were intertwined from the beginning.