The Looking Game

The Looking Game pairs the once-secret photographic archive of serial killer Rodney Alcala with writing by art critic John Berger, whose name Alcala took as an alias while a fugitive in New York in 1968. Alcala, an amateur photographer active through the late 1960s and 70s, left behind more than a thousand photographs that police discovered in a storage locker only in 2010; roughly 120 were released publicly in hopes the public could help identify the people pictured. Mirko Smerdel and M.F.G. Paltrinieri set that archive against extracts of Berger's writing, most pointedly Ways of Seeing, building a structure of five sections, intro, biography, statement, main body of work, and appendix, that asks whether Alcala's choice of alias was coincidence or a knowing appropriation of a critic concerned with exactly the ethics of looking Alcala's own photographs raise. The project drew criticism on publication for aestheticizing the case: reviewers questioned whether obscuring victims' faces for artistic effect sits uneasily alongside claims of investigative or identificatory purpose. The Looking Game is the first installment of The Subnarratives, an ongoing series of case studies by Smerdel and Paltrinieri examining photography's status as documentary evidence.