Priceless Celebrity Mugshots. Are These Portraits?

Frank Sinatra 1938

Round here we celebrate photographs. While they sometimes tell stories of love and laughter, they also sometimes tell stories of sadness, horror, or otherwise unsavory-ness. These mugshots of some of the most famous rock stars the world has ever known fall somewhere in between. Check out the confluence of stoicism, ego, and genius in this shot of Frank Sinatra (other greats from Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, David Bowie, Axl Rose and a dozen others after the jump…]

These images clearly have cultural value. Are these portraits? Where does the mugshot fit along this spectrum?

Jimi Hendrix 1969

Elvis Presley

Jim Morrison

Sid Vicious

David Bowie 1976

Axl Rose

So I ask you again. Are these portraits?

[and if, like me, you can’t get enough of these, head on over to HowToBeARetronaut to see Janis Joplin, Bill Gates, Jane Fonda, Kurt Cobain, Dennis Hopper, Woody Harrelson, and about a dozen others. Thanks FlavorPill for the tip.]

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59 replies on:
Priceless Celebrity Mugshots. Are These Portraits?

  1. Funny that you should publish this post today. I’m a documentary photography in Los Angeles and have been shooting Mugshots of musicians here for a while now to document the scene. [You can see some of them here at http://thisaintascene.com] There’s something compelling about a uniform approach to capturing portraits of a wide range of people that are somewhat connected to one another. My inspiration fell somewhere between Warhol’s extensive portraits of celebrities and artists using uniform polaroid film across the portraits and the aesthetics of “The Mugshot”.

  2. If these are portraits so are mug shots of the average Joe.
    These mugshots are entertaining & interesting to look at because of the subjects; they are famous (or rather notorious.)
    I suppose a mug shot can be a portrait, but the presence of a celebrity doesn’t automatically make a mug into a portrait.
    There would be no mug shot if there were no drama, no story to begin with.

    This is my 2 cents.

  3. That is too funny. Axl Rose was arrested in Lafayette, IN. I used to live in Lafayette.

  4. Yea, and some of them would make nice portraits especially the ones one the right. Just take away the signs and a little cropping. I think some like Hendrix’s are great.

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