Felonious Photography

CityBeat: Death of Innocence (2002-04-18)

In photography, you're lucky or highly skilled if the photo you take is "final" without doing any post processing... fooling with negatives, making adjustments, burning, dodging, using photoshop or other programs to manipulate colors, contrasts, sharpness... all sorts of things to help refine the image to what the artist desires. Sometimes, one mixes images or parts of images together to get a desired effect.

Unfortunately for one photographer, he never got a chance to make his art because of his local film developer. Film developers are not necessarily artists and need only know which chemicals go into which container, and can make certain adjustments when printing film to help push out something recognizable in the event of someone using bad camera settings. So this technician sees some photos she doesn't like and the next thing you know, a photographer, artist, is sent to jail for years on several counts of a felony, all for unfinished, unpublished work.

This is a travesty of justice. It's not justice at all, just a mock semblance that was similarily used in the past to hang witches.

This case needs to be appealed to the Supreme Court if needed. And if this backwoods trial court isn't reversed, then photographers still using film better heed this as a big "You've Been Warned."
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Death of Innocence

Out of the darkroom, into the limelight: Thomas Condon breaks his silence

By Maria Rogers

The same haunting face stares out from most of the pieces of art in Thomas Condon's studio in Walnut Hills. It's the face of a baby inspired by a photo he took 10 years ago.

A teddy bear covered in plaster sits below a photo of another baby. The innocence of the toy, and the face above it, are captured forever in the art.

Condon feels that childhood, and the emotions and changes that come with it, are topics to be explored in his art. He says he's always wondered how we maintain the morality and honesty we had as children in our adult lives, when worries of credit cards and jobs consume most of our day.

"There's a dilemma in losing that innocence of childhood but also wanting to grow up," Condon says in his studio during his first media interview since being charged with crimes resulting from photographs he took at the Hamilton County Morgue.

Part of growing up also means realizing that death is an aspect of the experience of life, Condon says. He'd hoped to capture that aspect of life in his morgue photography.

Instead of hanging next to birth photos as he had intended, however, the morgue photos ended up in a courtroom, causing a heated battle about what art is and what death really means.

A question of permission
Condon was convicted in October 2001 on eight counts of gross abuse of a corpse for taking photos of corpses in the county morgue. On April 16, he was sentenced to serve two and a half years in prison.

Standing before Common Pleas Judge Norbert Nadel prior to sentencing, Condon turned to the families of the deceased who were photographed and asked for their forgiveness. He also told Nadel he had an understanding with the Hamilton County Coroner's office that he was allowed to work on his project.

"That is the truth as much as anything that was said here," Condon said.

Condon said he had shown some of the prints of the photos he took in the morgue to Dr. Gary Utz, a pathologist at the coroner's office. He said he gave a list of symbolic objects he wanted to use in the photos to Terry Daly, an administrative aide for the coroner.

According to Condon, he was allowed to work on his project in exchange for making a training video for the coroner's office.

Robert Folchi, father of Christina Folchi, whose body was photographed by Condon, told Nadel what he'd gone through. He said his daughter had been killed in a car accident.

"We donated our daughter's organs, and we signed a release form," Folchi said. "I'd like to know what a symbolic object would be taking a picture of my daughter's pubic hair."

Robert Martineck, Folchi's grandfather, said the morgue photograph controversy had touched the lives of more than 35 members of his family and that whenever the family gets together the subject of the photos comes up. He pointed out that Folchi left behind a young daughter when she died.

"She'll never know her mother," Martineck said, adding that the girl would certainly hear about the photos taken of her mother's body.

Before sentencing Condon, Nadel said that the blame for what was done in the morgue ended with the defendant.

"Mr. Condon can assume what he wants to assume, but there was no permission here," he said.

Nadel also turned art critic before passing sentence and discussed the merits of Condon's photography.

"They're not art," he said. "They're sick, they're disgusting, they're disrespectful and really the worst invasion of privacy."

Nadel called the photo project "idiotic" and pointed out that Hamilton County was being sued because of the situation, which could cost taxpayers money.

The brutal truth
A week before his sentencing, Condon sits in his studio reflecting on what he's learned from the experience of being charged with and convicted for a crime associated with his art.

"I think so many people in their lives have never done what they love to do and they're miserable," he says.

For Condon, being in the morgue was a spiritual experience, a chance to view death from a more positive point of view. Part of what he finds so refreshing about children is their honesty.

"I think in depicting death and using death as a subject matter, it's being brutally honest," he says.

During his time spent in the morgue, Condon says he began to experience the place in the same way the people who work there did. The morgue workers, he points out, treated the situation as what it was -- a job. On television, he says, morgue scenes are often shown in dimly lit rooms full of solitude, but in fact the morgue workers talked about their weekends, listened to the radio and left the lights on.

"I just kind of lived in their shoes for a while and experienced it that way," Condon says. "There were difficult days. It was never matter-of-fact for me."

Condon says that his hope in working with the morgue imagery was to make death something less negative for people.

He says it's hurt him immensely to know that the morgue project has caused people pain. This, he feels, was the opposite of his goals of helping people see death as part of the overall experience of life and of maybe making a positive impact on the way they regard death.

"I feel and felt very strongly I was capturing something that was going to happen regardless of my presence or not," he says. "In pursuing the project, I would and could put myself in the place of that person who was photographed and deceased."

Condon's attorney, Louis Sirkin, says Condon is pained by the controversy's affect on family members of those photographed in the morgue.

"I don't think that was ever Tom's intention on anything," Sirkin says. "He certainly feels it and is regretful and feels the remorse of that."

Sirkin says death is a difficult subject.

"It's a subject matter that none of us really wants to think about," he says. "I guess that's the conflict artists have to go through when they take on a very controversial subject matter. He's a religious young man, a believer in God. Tom is dealing with it all."

Sirkin points out that he brought in testimony during Condon's trial from an Art Academy of Cincinnati professor to explain that what Condon was doing was art and the testimony went unchallenged. During the prosecutor's closing arguments, however, the art was dismissed as "bullshit."

"To refer to this bullshit project as art is an insult to you, to the victims," Assistant Prosecutor Thomas Longano said at the end of the trial in October.

Sirkin believes that, during the trial, the prosecution made a mockery of what Condon felt in his mind.

"Where does our government or our prosecutor all of a sudden become an art critic?" Sirkin asks.

Condon says many people told him he'd been convicted before his trial ever began.

"Art never entered the courtroom," Condon says.

Who was reckless?
Condon says he took care to ensure that those photographed in the morgue would not be identifiable, even to the point of making sure that tattoos or unusual birthmarks wouldn't show. He says he told colleagues that he was working on the project out of state to keep the identities of those photographed from being revealed.

According to Condon, the way the photos were developed wasn't how he would have produced them. The photo lab that processed his negatives alerted police to the photos in January 2001, and charges were subsequently brought against Condon and Assistant Coroner Dr. Jonathan Tobias. (Tobias was sentenced April 16 to five months in the Hamilton County Justice Center.)

Condon says he was planning to crop and manipulate the photos before displaying them and wouldn't have shown faces or identifiable marks.

"When they printed the images, most of them were just printed from negatives," he says. "I hadn't even began to work with them yet. They just took the film and printed it full frame in shitty harsh contrasts, real hard black, real hard white."

Condon says there are many ways to crop a photograph and that features can be masked using different techniques and textures.

"If it hadn't been disseminated the way it was, if the media didn't completely take it as an opportunity -- they made it an opportunity for a very entertaining story for them," he says.

He questions why the photos were shown on television news and allowed to be released to the public in the first place.

"They didn't care," he says, refering to county prosecutors, the police and the media, "and they're calling me reckless."

Condon says he had "no immediate plans" for the photographs. They were a work in progress, he says, and could have eventually been used in a gallery exhibition or a book project.

Looking ahead
Before Condon was branded "the morgue photographer," he was Chris Jones' brother, the man who took pictures of her son's birth and captured his baby smiles in photographs displayed proudly in her living room.

Jones says the way her brother has been portrayed in the media is not how he really is.

Condon says he's received more than 60 letters from family, friends and colleagues offering their support, something he likes to think of as a sort of "living eulogy." Leafing through a stack of letters of support, Jones reads aloud some of the positive things they contain.

"I think every letter just about said the words 'gentle' and 'trusting,' " she says.

Condon's family says he would never intentionally hurt other people. In fact, they say that the purpose of the morgue photos was to try to make death less difficult for people to think about.

"Maybe it would help people value more their own lives and the people they love," says Kelly Blank, Condon's wife.

For more than a year, Condon's family has been waiting to see what would happen to him. First they experienced the shock of his indictment and then heard the guilty verdicts.

On April 15, they sit together and prepare for what would happen the next morning at his sentencing.

"Everything's just been hinging on this one day, it seems," says Kathy Condon, Thomas' mother.

Jones says her brother held a benefit event last September to help pay for his legal defense but instead decided to give all the money to the victims of the Sept. 11 attack.

"It bothers me that people have such a false impression of him," she says.

Kathy Condon says her son had permission to take the photographs in the morgue.

"No one should be allowed to say Thomas does not see this as art," she says. "They may not like it, but that doesn't mean it's wrong."

Jones says people often ask her how she would feel if it were her family member in the photos. She says she tells them that of course she'd be upset but that she would try to understand what the artist's intent was in taking the photo.

"He's totally opposite of what's been reported," Jones says. "How do you undo the damage that's already been done?"

Blank says news crews used to surround Condon's home at all times. In order to leave the house, she'd have to drive around the block two or three times to distract them, and then Condon would make a run for his car.

Despite all that's happened, Blank is excited about the future. On April 13, the weekend before Condon's sentencing, Blank and Condon were married.

She sees good things to come.

"Sometimes the only way through something is through it," Blank says, pointing straight ahead. "We have a long road ahead, positive things. Everything's going to be OK, because we're strong." ©

E-mail Maria Rogers