ID

Several years ago, I was looking through some boxes of family photographs and found my grandmother's ID badge for Fort Benning in Georgia. I'd never seen one like it before. It was metal and weighty, and wearing it would be more like wearing a very small framed picture of yourself than any laminated, holographic, plastic card people use today. The badge is over 60 years old, and is in far better shape than my sad looking student ID. After 4 years of swiping it at the dining hall and the library, it resembles more of a faded smear than me.

I found out about this exhibition that opened last Friday at Ricco/Maresca in New York. It is a very small portraiture show focusing on ID badges from the '30s-'50s. If you visit the link, you can scroll through several badges featured in the show. I had never seen another badge like my grandmother's before, and here on the New Yorker website were 15 more I could look at. The show features 250 of these tiny portraits, and Frank Maresca, co-partner of Ricco/Maresca says, “The show is an important portrait of the American worker, during a time when workers changed America as we know it.”

My grandmother's badge. Wasn't she pretty?