Working With Negatives Joseph Mills Photos Capture Gritty Inner City Washington by Gary Tischler All of the works and images in ìJoseph Mills: Inner City,î now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, say almost exactly the same thing by way of identification: ìUntitled, Washington, D.C.î Most of the photographs were taken during the late 1980s, but you donít know who is pictured, why or exactly where in Washington, although you can guess. It almost looks like another time and place, yet it is strongly connected to memory and milieu. This is the first solo museum exhibition for Mills, who has been the longtime photographer at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown. It is as it stands now a kind of highly personal memory collage. Thereís something combative about Millsís photographs, as if theyíre being energetically pushed at you, ordering you not to look away. Millsí subjectsóboth the people and the backgroundóthe way he photographed them and his methods for reproducing the photographs are all pertinent here. The finished product has the quality of negative film left out too long or pictures kept in wallets past their time. There is a sharp reality to the 50 photos in the exhibition, and in their own harsh, unsentimental way, they become unforgettable. Mills shot the images in the 1980s but in 1999, he happened across a box of unexposed, expired photo paper. He took 75 images from the old negatives, ones that had never before been printed, and printed them on the found paper. The results recreate the original atmosphere of the photograph in an exceptionally vivid way. The paper retains the images of heat, dust, sweaty energy, lethargy, dying hope and unquenched and almost dangerous forms of curiosity. Mills captured Washington as old downtown that is now changing and disappearing. His photographs depict daytime workers coming and going, catching buses, riding the Metro, and mixing with the impermanent permanent people of the areaóthe homeless, the panhandlers, the mentally ill and marginal, splayed along parks, alleys, street corners and benches, sometimes within the shadows, other times out in the sun. However, these arenít social issue photographs. They could, of course, be taken that way given that many of the people in the photographs are obviously homeless. But the images also just exist on their own, without any particular social message. Even veteran Washingtonians wonít recognize much in the picturesóperhaps a Peopleís drugstore sign before the coming of CVS, a Florsheim shoe shop or a park bench. In Washington, buildings come and go as fast as the people do, and in some ways, Washington has become a restless, muscular city unable to retain a human face. In the 1980s, the wandering homeless population may have been much larger than it is now, or at least it had more of a visible presence. If you walked through the downtown area, through neighborhoods that mixed residential areas with office and commercial space, faces would start to emerge from between the buildings and the groups walking by. Mills saw these faces and details, and like Robert Frank, whom he admires, he went out and confronted the atmosphere, the people and the milieu. Often, according to Mills, he saw much of his own personality and inner demons in the photographs. He shot casually, from the hipóliterallyóat mid-point level. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Walker Evans and his subway photos. Evans, who often talked about the ìhungry eye,î strapped a camera to himself and would shoot candid but revealing shots of people on the New York subways. This isnít to say that Mills is imitative. He has his own eyes, his own art and his own view. Children, like flowers in concrete, dot this exhibitionóa counterpoint to the desultory, pained people we see along the way. Some of these people are sleeping. One sports a glowing tumor on his forehead. A man in a fur coat waves a flag and preaches with his arms spread wide to the sky. A woman puts gum on the tip of a long fingernail. Another wears one high heel while the other foot is bare. The steel contraption of a foot brace is seen up close, and there are many other wrenching close-ups of heels and feet, layers of skin gone or so callused as to reveal a new genetic code. The world that Mills has captured, and recaptured, seems untethered. The people in it, their afflictions, their state of being, seem unrelated to their surroundings. Those not on the move seem ready to fall down right where they are, to remain rooted out of nothing more than sheer fatigue and a lack of locomotion, no longer able to keep on keeping on. ìJoseph Mills: Inner Cityî runs through April 14 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St., NW. For more information, please call (202) 639-1700 or visit www.corcoran.org. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.