Jessamyn Lovell builds gallery show out of her ID theft

Jessamyn Lovell’s show at SF Camerawork uses 34 framed images with descrip tions under each of the woman she says stole her identity. Jessamyn Lovell’s show at SF Camerawork uses 34 framed images with descrip tions under each of the woman she says stole her identity. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Jessamyn Lovell builds gallery show out of her ID theft 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Five years ago, photographer Jessamyn Lovell was at SF Camerawork discussing her upcoming show when she put down her wallet just long enough for it to disappear. Then she became a victim of identify theft, a scam that brought her mysterious bills and an unwarranted summons to appear in court on theft charges.

This is not an unusual story — about 16 million Americans are victims of identity theft every year, subject to a bureaucratic nightmare of reclaiming what was theirs all along — but what is unusual is that Lovell decided to turn her frustrations into a photo project.

The subject is a San Francisco woman who Lovell believes used her ID and credit cards to steal her identity. Lovell used a private investigator to track the woman down, then Lovell used her camera to capture the woman’s identity.

'Her choices, not mine’

The result is “Dear Erin Hart,” a solo exhibition at SF Camerawork, which runs through Saturday.

“I wanted to build a portrait of her as a way to understand the choices she made that led to our paths crossing,” Lovell says. “Those were her choices, not mine.”

The gallery walls look like something from a cable TV show about CIA operatives, with surveillance photos shot by Lovell, photos of various residences, mug shots, arrest reports and letters from vendors demanding payment.

Erin Colleen Hart served a year in county jail in 2011 for Lovell’s case and other crimes, including check fraud, forgery and second-degree burglary. According to the office of District Attorney George Gascón, Hart pleaded guilty recently to another charge of identity theft, a felony for which she was sentenced Oct. 1 to three years in custody. (She has been released from custody to serve her sentence under mandatory supervision. Any infraction will result in jail time.)

The Chronicle is publishing images that do not identify Lovell’s exhibition subject because the newspaper cannot independently verify that the woman in Lovell’s photos is Hart.

“I base all of my work on a fact that I experienced,” says Lovell, 37, a lecturer in art at the University of New Mexico. She now lives in Albuquerque, but she was living in Oakland the day her wallet was stolen in 2009. At the time, Lovell was at Camerawork for another project: a photo essay of her tracking down her estranged father on the coast of Mendocino. She hadn’t seen him in 12 years before the photography project that became “No Trespassing” in 2010.

Lovell’s investigation into who stole her identity started on Feb. 6, 2011, when San Francisco police called to tell her that Hart had been arrested trying to check into the Hotel Vitale on the Embarcadero, under the name Laurel Jessamyn Lovell. Soon after, bills started arriving for rental cars, parking tickets and toll evasions under Lovell’s name. Then she had to appear in court in Alameda County to answer the theft charges.

It took a flight from Albuquerque to Oakland to clear that up. “I sat there for an entire morning while people were carted away in handcuffs,” she says. “I was very scared I might be taken away.” The charges against Lovell were dropped, but the hassle was still there.

“I got really, really mad, like I’d never been before,” Lovell says. “That’s when I decided to retrace her steps and make a project out of it.”

Hiring private investigator

Hart was hard to trace because she was in San Francisco County Jail on the ID theft conviction — information that Lovell could not obtain until she hired private eye Pete Siragusa.

He got Hart’s release date, March 21, 2013, and Lovell and Siragusa staked out the Hall of Justice.

“I went into the day wanting to approach her and meet her,” Lovell said. “Pete convinced me that was not a good idea.”

So Lovell waited behind tinted windows in a sport utility vehicle. Through a telephoto lens, she saw a person who fit Hart’s description come through the door. She also used her iPhone to make a selfie of herself photographing the woman, because the photographer is unavoidably part of the story.

“It was high-speed adrenaline. I’m jumping in and out of the SUV photographing her,” Lovell says. “She hops on the bus, she gets off the bus. She goes to Goodwill.” Eventually the woman in question sensed that she was being followed and took evasive measures, stepping into a maze of a building in the Mission.

Lovell went back to New Mexico and built a dossier on Hart, who is 43. She was born in Colorado and received a Social Security number a year later. She ended up in South Dakota and left an arrest record as she moved to New York and then San Francisco.

Hart seemed to be a person who moved around a lot, and Siragusa dug up the addresses. Then Lovell returned to San Francisco in March to resume the search.

“I mostly was going to these places to just get a feeling of her, a closeness,” she says. “I interviewed landlords, I interviewed security guards. She lived in some pretty nice places.”

Lovell waited at an address in Glen Park for three days, and was in her rental car when the woman she recognized from before finally came out. Lovell got several images from across the street, then pulled in behind as the woman was walking.

“She definitely knew that she was being followed, and I could tell she deliberately lost me,” says Lovell, who mailed the woman in question an invitation to the opening reception for the gallery show.

Following the mystery

Lovell made it a point never to invade the woman’s private space: She may wait in front like a paparazzo, but she’s only attempted to photograph the woman in public places.

There are 34 framed images in the show, with typed descriptions under each, so you can follow the mystery.

“This woman entered my life without my permission,” Lovell says, “and I then used that experience without her permission to create something new.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf