Winnick Chapel, Brown RISD Hillel , 80 Brown Street
Shawn Michelle Smith
Professor, Visual Artist & Scholar, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Shawn Michelle Smith will discuss Taryn Simon's The Innocents, a project that documents 45 legal cases of mistaken identification, in which individuals were misrecognized as the perpetrators of violent crimes on the basis of mug shots and other visual aids. Like Simon, Smith will explore photography's problematic, and powerful relation to criminal identification, even as she also assesses some of the ambiguities and contradictions within Simon's provocative work.