Last month, just weeks before Election Day, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City debuted two exhibitions premised on pairings of contemporary and archival photography. Jesse Krimes: Corrections joins works by the formerly incarcerated artist with 19th-century cartes de visite by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, and Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans couples two photographers, a century apart, whose visions of the state chronicle its paradise mythos and inherent dangers.
These parallel juxtapositions examine incongruities — the hypocrisies of our criminal justice system on the one hand; the contradictions of a once-battleground state that became a hotbed of extremism on the other — and stir a markedly visceral response ahead of an election defined by cognitive dissonance.
The lesser-evil vote for Kamala Harris, all other issues aside, implies a gesture of support for Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians under the Biden administration, from whose stance she has shown no signs of diverging. But third-party candidates stand no chance of winning. Trump would most certainly deport millions of undocumented people, deploy the military on protesters, and strangle whatever’s left of women’s reproductive rights in this country, all while showing no mercy for Palestine.
The discomfort of dissonance underlies Samoylova’s series Floridas, which dates from 2017, when Trump took office, to 2021, the year of the January 6 insurrection. To photograph a roadside gun store in Port Orange in 2019, the artist road-tripped from her Miami home to parts of the state that epitomize the phrase “the more north you go, the more south you get.” The vibrantly painted exterior of J and L guns is adorned with chilling silhouettes of AK-47-style assault rifles. This summer, the business shared its “emphatic” endorsement of Trump on its Facebook page. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Evans’s picture of a Mermaid Curio shop, taken in 1941 during one of the documentary photographer’s various trips to Florida, is like an uncanny mirror image.
In a palette of brilliant azure and crushed orange, some of Samoylova’s other works render haunting scenes of climate disaster: a car partly submerged in floodwater, an abandoned building by the polluted Miami River. Between expert black-and-white glimpses of banyan trees, wind-swept palms, and souvenir kitsch, selections from Evans’s personal collection of penny postcards tell a sanitized history of the state. “See America First, Come to Florida,” beckons one of them.
In a separate gallery on the same floor, Corrections gathers diverse works by Krimes made over the five years he spent in federal prisons for nonviolent drug charges. Together with prints of “suspected pickpockets” by Bertillon, whose flawed method combining photography and physical measurements is seen as a precursor of the modern-day mugshot, Krimes’s installations call into question unchallenged notions of who constitutes an “offender.” The artist and prison reform advocate developed ersatz printing processes using prison-issued items to create works such as “Purgatory” (2009), culling photographs of individuals accused of crimes from newspapers, transferring the images onto small bars of soap, and inserting them into playing cards, reframing them as kings, queens, and jacks. Many of those pictured are among the millions who cannot vote because of disenfranchisement laws that largely exclude incarcerated people (even as false claims of election fraud are permitted to run rampant).
Right: Alphonse Bertillon, “Zanini. Marie (veuve Milanaccio). 28 ans, née à Turin (Italie). Cuisinière” (1894), 4 1/8 x 2 3/4 inches, (10.5 x 7 cm), albumen silver print from glass negative (both images courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Krimes, who served his first year in solitary confinement — considered a form of psychological torture by human rights groups — has spoken openly about his relative fortune compared to Black and Brown individuals he met in prison who faced harsher sentences for similar charges. His massive mural “Apokaluptein:16389067” (2010–13), printed onto cotton bed sheets that he mailed out one by one and later stitched together, collages advertisements, drawings, and news images of contemporary crises both natural and man-made into a Dantean topography of the criminal justice system.
It’s a commentary not just on punishment but also on impunity — on the horrors of unchecked mass incarceration and the illusion of accountability while individuals in power, even those found guilty of crimes, roam free. Some are even allowed to run for office.
In the nation Krimes and Samoylova portray, political philosophy often clashes jarringly with lived experience. Voters in the regions most devastated by climate change deny its very existence, and many Latine citizens oppose the same policies that once gave refuge to their ancestors. In such a circus, what is left? Vote, these exhibitions seem to whisper to us — but not just for president. To be clear, nothing in the curatorial texts or wall labels for these shows references the election. Yet many of the issues Krimes and Samoylova bring to the surface dovetail with dynamics of oppression that expose the failures of a two-party system and limitations of the executive branch. Harris’s gun discourse has been tepid, ostensibly in a bid to attract moderate voters. However, in Colorado, one of the first such ballot measures in US history could levy a tax on the manufacture and sale of guns and ammunitions, and in key battleground states, legislative races may hold the key to passing gun control legislation in Congress.
No one, and especially not those with personal ties to the barbarities being committed by Israel, can be blamed for Democratic votes lost to Palestinian solidarity. But many of us are at fault for not doing more at the grassroots level, for shouting from the rooftops about the Harris-Trump binary while insufficiently engaging in community advocacy or fighting for local officials who represent real change.
In “Dome House with Upside-Down Flag” (2021), Samoylova captured a notorious symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to discredit the 2020 presidential election, in the Florida Panhandle town of Navarre. It’s a sobering reminder that tomorrow, November 5, is only the beginning.
Jesse Krimes: Corrections continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through July 13, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Virginia McBride. Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans runs through May 11, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Mia Fineman.
