Detroit police photographer
American, active 1930s
Mug Shot of Mike Stone, Communist
INV-1526
Detroit police photographer
American, active 1930s1932
Mug Shot of Mike Stone, Communist
Detroit police photographer American, active 1930s →gelatin silver (developing-out-paper) prphotographic process
Date
1932
Medium
Gelatin silver print stapled to printed card
Dimensions
Image/paper: 7 × 11 cm (2 13/16 × 4 3/8 in.); Card: 12.7 × 20.3 cm (5 × 8 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Estate of Katherine Kuh
In the 1930s the Communist Party enjoyed considerable support in the United States. Nevertheless, this booking card indicates that in 1932, Michigan Central Railroad police arrested Mike Stone, a politically active Pennsylvania coal miner; his crime, in a word, was “Communism.” Eight years later, Stone was charged with perjury and false pretense for gathering illegal signatures on petitions and received a possible maximum penalty of 42 years in jail. Apparently, he served a reduced term, as his name surfaced repeatedly in the early-1950s testimony of undercover FBI agent Matthew Cvetic. Photography likely played a role in Stone’s repeated arrests: mug shots, like the one seen here, had been employed in increasingly sophisticated ways for criminal identification since the late 1880s.
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