Mary Pickford’s mugshot: early Hollywood celebrities and San Quentin Prison Joshua A. Mitchell Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA ABSTRACT On a 1924 tour of San Quentin Prison, film star Mary Pickford sat to have her photograph taken in the studio of imprisoned photogra- pher Sid Kepford, who was responsible for taking the prison’s mug- shots. Pickford was far from the only motion picture celebrity to pass through the institution, however, and this article exposes the extent to which San Quentin was a destination for Hollywood’s actors and directors, who moved about the prison with great freedom due to the permission granted to them by star-struck wardens. This article places the Pickford photograph in a history of carceral images, out- lines a history of film spectatorship at San Quentin, and reveals just how inviting the prison was to its panoply of Hollywood guests. KEYWORDS Mary Pickford; motion picture celebrities; mugshot photography; nontheatrical exhibition; prison tourism; San Quentin Prison In November 1924, San Quentin Prison’s monthly magazine the Bulletin announced that film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had visited the California prison to meet with Warden James A. Johnston and Captain K. T. Pietrzak. The international travels of Pickford and Fairbanks had gained public notoriety since the couple’s 1920 honeymoon in Europe, and San Quentin’s prison publication reported on the stars’ tour of the prison with the same excitement as the conventional press. ‘The news spread like wildfire’, wrote a San Quentin journalist, referring to the arrival of Pickford and Fairbanks. ‘The wonders of the Radio for broadcasting are nothing when compared to the “inside news service” for the effective dissemination of news’ (B. 1924, n.p.). Warden Johnston would later reflect on Fairbanks and Pickford’s visit in his autobiography, recounting that rain had pre- vented them from touring as much of the prison as they had expected. ‘All the men wanted to see Mary’, Johnston wrote, ‘and she was equally popular with the women prisoners. She bought hundreds of handkerchiefs and other bits of needlework made by the women, and made sure that no woman was overlooked. She paid them generously, and won their hearts the way she talked with them about their stitches’ (Johnston 1937, 286). 1 A photograph of Johnston, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Pietrzak appeared in the Bulletin alongside news of the stars’ visit, taken by imprisoned photographer Sid Kepford (Figure 1). Noting that Fairbanks offered to donate a print of his newly released film The Thief of Baghdad (1924) to be screened at San Quentin, the imprisoned Bulletin author ended his article with a wish that the two film stars ‘enjoyed their visit and found it most profitable CONTACT Joshua A. Mitchell mitc153@usc.edu EARLY POPULAR VISUAL CULTURE 2023, VOL. 21, NO. 3, 331–347 https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2137222 © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group