Small Town Noir

There's an excellent exhibition in the Filmhouse cafe bar just now, Small Town Noir: Mug Shots from New Castle, Pennsylvania - 1930 to 1960 by Diarmid Mogg. There's some text about the exhibition below, and a link to his beautifully written and painstakingly researched website.


New Castle, a small town in western Pennsylvania, was once one of the most industrially productive cities in America, with dozens of factories operating 24 hours a day, providing the livelihoods of thousands of immigrant workers and their families.

The Small Town Noir collection details the stories behind a group of mug shots that were taken as the town struggled through the great depression, the second world war, the Korean war and the beginning of the collapse of the manufacturing industries that it relied on for its survival. The city that the subjects of the pictures used to know has vanished. An entire way of life has passed.

Towards the end of the century, when New Castle's population had shrunk to half the size that it had been in the forties and its unemployment rate had risen to twice the national average, the police cleared out their mug shot files. Thousands of old photographs were thrown in the trash.

A few hundred ended up on eBay.

I bought as many as I could.

The stories behind the mug shots have been pieced together from old copies of the New Castle News, the local paper, but the record is incomplete, and many stories are simply lost and will never be known.

New Castle's steel mills have closed now, the downtown streets are deserted. The men and women in these pictures saw things that none of us will ever see. All that we can do is look clearly at their faces, listen carefully to their stories and let them tell us what they can about their world, and what life was like in that long-gone town.

Diarmid Mogg

More mug shots and stories: smalltownnoir.com