Vices (2023)

A Medieval Filing System Still in Use

The list of deadly sins was assembled for pastoral purposes in late antiquity, revised by Gregory the Great, and given its most durable literary architecture by Dante. It was a management tool for confession, and it has outlived the institution that needed it by several centuries. Exhibitions on vice still reach for it because it is the only widely shared taxonomy of bad behaviour available, and because it is unusually well suited to pictures: each entry has a posture, a prop, and a facial expression already attached. This exhibition collected thirty works from thirty artists, credited between 1986 and 2023, and the media range from silver prints and archival prints to collage, oil, and acrylic on linen.

The Category Will Not Hold Still

What counts as a vice is renegotiated continuously, which makes work on this subject age faster than almost any other genre. Smoking moved from sophistication to public health emergency inside two generations. Gambling has been substantially normalised and rebranded. Drinking has cycled through several positions. A photograph of a vice is therefore also a photograph of a moment's moral consensus, and the pictures that survive tend to be the ones that noticed the consensus was temporary.

Observation Versus Verdict

The genre has an inherited problem, which is that photographing other people's transgressions has historically been a respectable cover for looking at them. Nineteenth and twentieth-century documentary campaigns produced enormous archives of the poor, the intoxicated, and the incarcerated, framed as reform and functioning as spectacle. The distinction between observation and verdict is not always visible in the picture itself, and it usually turns on whether the subject appears to have any authority in the exchange.

Malebolge as Designed Space

One work in this catalog takes Dante's eighth circle as its subject, which is a more interesting choice than it first appears. Malebolge is not a metaphor but a piece of architecture: ten concentric stone trenches with bridges, assigned by category of fraud. Dante's innovation was to make punishment a matter of zoning. Treating hell as a building rather than a state of mind gives a photographer or a painter something to actually construct, and it locates the horror in administration rather than in flames.

Pleasure Photographs Badly

Guilt has a visual language. Shame produces posture, aftermath produces still lifes of empty glasses and disordered rooms, and both are easy to read. Actual pleasure is much harder, because it either looks staged or looks like nothing much. This is why so much work on vice is really about consequence, and why the small number of pictures that manage to convey appetite without either condemning or advertising it stand out sharply in a catalog like this one.

Why the Theme Recurs

A brief about transgression tells you what the current boundaries are by showing what photographers think is worth testing. TCG Gallery is an independent online photography gallery, and each juried exhibition remains part of a permanent public archive after its run ends, so this catalog remains available as a record of where those boundaries sat. Photographers can enter the current photography open calls directly.