If you’ve ever had your wallet stolen, you know what a pain it can be (and if not, just imagine it). For most people, canceling a few cards and losing some cash is the end of it. But for Jessamyn Lovell, losing her wallet was the beginning of a long and unsettling process to recover what was taken---her identity.
A thief stole Lovell's wallet in San Francisco five years ago, but it wasn't until 2011 that she learned someone had used the information within it to assume her identity and commit a series of petty crimes. Police identified the suspect who was using her identity as Erin Hart, and Lovell soon found out that the woman had been masquerading under her name while shoplifting, checking into hotels, and renting cars. To help cope with the shock and bring a measure of closure to the ordeal, Lovell decided to find Hart and document the journey in Dear Erin Hart.
“When I thought of this project, I didn’t have in my mind that I was going to find her and beat her up, but I did want to try and figure out who she was and try to figure out why she did this to me,” Lovell says. “And I made it into a photo project because that's how I make sense of things.”
Lovell searched for Hart on her own but came up blank after finding nothing more to photograph than empty crime scenes and a few apartments where her quarry once lived. So she hired a private investigator, who immediately found Hart in jail on multiple charges including one related to Lovell's case. In 2013, Lovell travelled to San Francisco and photographed Hart walking out of city lockup after serving eight months of a one-year sentence. Lovell and the PI, plus two of his assistants, then spent the day following and photographing Hart as she wandered about the city---buying cigarettes, riding the bus, and shopping at Goodwill. They eventually lost Hart after she wandered into an alley near a taqueria.
During their surveillance, Lovell thought about confronting Hart, but eventually ruled against it. She worried the conversation might escalate into something she wasn't at all prepared for. “I had been debating it up until that very day but ultimately decided to wait,” she says.
That day with the PI cost several thousand dollars, so he didn't accompany Lovell on any more stakeouts. But he did continue helping her track Hart, and Lovell found her one more time the next year. By this point she'd amassed enough photos for a show, which opened in September of 2014 at SF Camerawork---where her wallet had been stolen. A book is slated for this March.
The last time Lovell had anything to do with Hart was this past December. She wrote a letter telling Hart why she’d been photographing her. The woman's probation officer told Lovell that a condensed version of that letter, sent as an email, had reached Hart. In the letter Lovell asked Hart to contact her, but never received a return email or phone call.
“I just wanted her to know that she impacted a real person,” Lovell says.
The photographer says she made peace with the incident over the course of her project and feels some kinship with Hart. Lovell grew up poor and has always been conscious about poverty and class, and although she doesn't know for sure, she suspects Hart has had her own struggles with money. Lovell has no desire to befriend Hart, yet wishes her the best.
“I don’t think that we share a lot of emotional similarities,” Lovell says. “For example, I think she’s way less empathetic than I am, but I do think we’ve been through similar struggles.”
