"Mugshots"

It's tempting to adopt film noir slang when discussing Chris Crites' mugshots painted in acrylic on paper bags. The 1940s-era San Francisco criminals who stare at the viewer certainly look hard-boiled: They leer with defiance and disgust, lips pursed, eyes hooded, eyebrows raised, heads bandaged. Some are depicted in blaring colors, as if a neon sign haunts the scene; others are given a black-and-gray-tone treatment, as though pulled from a newspaper. That the portraits are painted on five-by-seven-inch paper bags speaks to society's judgment that these are disposable people, a judgment Crites' loving rendering works against. Each portrait is titled with the detainee's crime — arson, forgery, shoplifting, "mental case" — conjuring up lives on the fringe. In fact, Crites says he can't help but imagine a story for each of his subjects. "One of the reasons I paint them is to bring out another possible story for people to look at and think about," he writes on his Web site. Hung in a hair salon, these faces from the past pack a dissonant punch.