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Cruel and Unusual Newspaper Noorderlicht
Catalogue of the Noorderlicht exhibition Cruel and Unusual, 2012
http://link_same_as qrcode.com/interview cruel and unusual February 18 � April 1 2012 Groningen The Netherlands /PPOTR noorderlicht Photogallery cruel and unusual cruel and unusual cover photo: The Twins: Bless and Kojak (SERIES: Life After) Araminta de Clermont p.1-5 / p.26-31 Cruel and Unusual is an expansive exhibition of narrative-rich photography from behind prison walls, including the work of: Araminta de Clermont Amy Elkins Alyse Emdur Christiane Feser Brenda Ann Kenneally Jane Lindsay Deborah Luster Nathalie Mohadjer Yana Payusova Lizzie Sadin Lori Waselchuk ...and many others. http://www.noorderlicht.com/en/publisher/ http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/ The Image / Incarceration / Representation / Media / Social Justice / Responsible Photography http://www.beikey.net/mrs-deane/ Nothing is too amazing to be true. Much of the work is being shown in Europe and the Netherlands for the first time. Cruel and Unusual looks at how prison systems are depicted and what those depictions tell us. As taxpayers and empathetic humans, how well informed are we of the lives and experiences within penal institutions? How are images of locked facilities manufactured, distributed and consumed? United by what might be considered a limiting subject matter, the exhibited photographers employ a wide range of approaches, materials and techniques. The work varies from vernacular photography, alternative processes, texts, painted photos, and digital manipulations to straight black and white documentary. Prisons are "home" for over 9 million people on this planet. As curators, we hope this show will act as a moment to ask ourselves what our different societies should hope to achieve by (mass) incarcerating those who transgress. In the U.S. the expense and failure of prisons has come under increasing scrutiny since the global economic recession. Over a period of just 40 years, failed `tough on crime' policies, sensationalist TV media, prison privatization, and a misinformed public contributed to a near 500% increase of the U.S. prison population. Recent arms trade figures show substantial investments in police and military crowd and riot control systems across Africa, the wider Middle East and beyond. Incarceration is one of the many instruments put into place by states fearing popular revolts and riots threatening their internal stability. In Europe, policies and public opinions are shifting with regards to prison population management, longer sentencing guidelines, the outsourcing of inmates across borders, and stricter immigration laws. The Netherlands has seen considerable fluctuations of its prison population over the past decades. Currently the population is in decline, and inmates from neighboring Belgium are (temporarily) housed in the surplus cells. Simultaneously, detention regimes have become more severe for immigrants and asylum seekers, including juveniles and families with children. Cruel and Unusual also looks at the utility of freelance online publishing. As bloggers with academic backgrounds, we happily invest time and intellectual capital in our research and writing. Our blogs and those of colleagues have become resources - almost contemporary libraries - that others utilize and perhaps even capitalise upon. For a host of reasons, printed journalism is in decline. Simultaneously, bloggers refine their messages unhindered. Related, but not necessarily causal, we want to acknowledge these two trends and the disruption at hand. "Prison Landscapes is a collection of over 150 photographs of prison inmates representing themselves in front of visiting room backdrops. Such backdrops, often painted by talented inmates, are used within the prisons as portrait studios. As inmates and their visitors pose for photos in front of these idealized landscapes they pretend, for a brief moment, that they are someplace else. The photographs are given to these visitors as gifts to take home and remember the faces of their loved ones while they are incarcerated. Prison Landscapes explores this little known and largely physically inaccessible genre of painting and portraiture seen only by inmates, visitors, and prison employees. It offers viewers a rare opportunity to see America's incarcerated population, not through the lens of criminality, but through the eyes of inmates' loved ones. The collection was inspired by a photograph I found of myself at age five posing in front of a tropical beach scene while visiting my brother in prison. Since discovering this first portrait in my own family album, I have invited hundreds of prisoners to send me photographs for inclusion in this collection." Alyse Emdur http://www.noorderlicht.com/ Prison Photography on the road p.6-24 Colophon This catalogue is published on occasion of the exhibition `Cruel and Unusual' in the Noorderlicht Photogallery, Groningen, from February 18 through April 1, 2012. Published by Aurora Borealis under the auspices of Noorderlicht Akerkhof 12 9711 JB Groningen The Netherlands tel. (00 31) 50 3 18 22 27 email@example.com www.noorderlicht.com concept and editing: Pete Brook, Hester Keijser design: Pierre Derks printing: NDC Print The copyright on photographs resides with the photographers. The copyright on the texts resides with the authors. Nothing from this publication may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher. � Stichting Fotografie Noorderlicht 2012 With fondness and irony, Noorderlicht has published this catalog for Cruel and Unusual formatted as a newspaper. Along with visuals from the main exhibition, it contains articles, interviews, ephemera and material from photographers Brook encountered during his crowd-funded trip through the U.S., capturing the chaos, interactions and visual excitement he saw in photographers' studios, on contact-sheets, sketches, archives and in home-towns while on the road. Photographers highlighted in this section are: Jenn Ackerman Jeff Barnett-Winsby Steve Davis Lloyd Degrane Harvey Finkle Tim Gruber Scott Houston Sean Kernan Jon Lowenstein Tim Matsui Frank McMains Ara Oshagan Joseph Rodriguez Richard Ross Adam Shemper Marilyn Suriani Stephen Tourlentes Sye Williams The title of the show, Cruel and Unusual, refers to a long-established legal term that first appeared in the 1689 English Bill of Rights. Adopted in the late 18th century as part of the U.S. Constitution, the Eighth Amendment declares: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." In 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that understanding of "cruel and unusual punishments" should change over time, being those punishments which offend society's "evolving sense of decency." Each of the presented projects poses the question, into what our sense of decency is evolving. David Wells Alyse Emdur 2005-2011 SERIES: Prison Landcapes David Wells, Thumb Correctional Facility, Lapeer, Michigan. 2005-2011 SERIES: Prison Landcapes Anonymous Backdrop Painted in Shawangunk Correctional Facility, New York. Pete Brook and Hester Keijser, February 2012 cruel and unusual cruel and unusual Passport (Solomon) Araminta de Clermont 2008 SERIES: Life After This series is an exploration into the tattoos, and lives, of members of South Africa's `Numbers' prison gangs (the 26s, 27s & 28s) after having been released back into society, normally after many years, if not decades, of imprisonment. In jail, the men she photographed are considered to be "Kings." Once freed, their tattoos stigmatize them as dangerous criminals, obscure their humanity and evoke fear in the general public. Unable to get jobs, many become homeless `strollers,' suffering high levels of substance abuse. " Black is the Day, Black is the Night explores identity using concepts of time, accumulation, memory and distance through personal correspondence with men serving life and deathrow sentences in some of the most maximum security prisons in the U.S., all of which had served between 13-26 years at point of contact. Over the past year I have constructed images using formulas specific to each inmate's shared story, age and years incarcerated; where the ratio of years spent in prison to years alive determines the level of image loss or layer accumulation. Through these formulas their portraits become more unrecognizable and their memories (sky, ocean, etc) become more muddled, regurgitated and fictional with the endless passing years of their life or deathrow sentence. Stripped of personal context and placed in solitary cells, their sense of identity, memory and time can't help but mutate. While some pieces were created using these formulas, as well as letter excerpts, Google maps and appropriated images- other pieces were reconstructed or sought out online using descriptions in letters of items either handmade by the inmate or otherwise allowed in cells (homemade jump rope, fictional bookshelf, food tray). This project explores ideas of identity, but is also meant to bring light and raise questions about our nations prison systems and use of capital punishment. I remain in touch with all of my penpals to this day, minus one whose execution went through in September 2009." Amy Elkins 19/32 (Not the Man I Once Was) Amy Elkins 2009 SERIES: Black is the Day, Black is the Night (2009 - ongoing) Portrait of a man having thus far served 19 years of a Life without Parole (solitary) sentence where the ratio of years spent in prison to years alive determined the level of image loss. USA, Boot Camp California Lizzie Sadin 1999-2007 SERIES: Children behind bars How a State treats its prisoners is a good indicator of the quality of its democracy. A society is judged as to how it treats its minors. Too often promiscuity, racketeering and violence reign in the prisons, detention centers and camps, designed specifically to house young children. Too often dignity is violated. Over the course of eight years and in eleven countries - in countries of conflict or peace; in countries with rule-of-law and in non-democratic countries - Sadin depicts the inequalities, injustices and humiliations often suffered by incarcerated children. 9 Years out of a Death Row Sentence (forest) Amy Elkins A pen pal 13 years into his death row sentence describes a childhood memory of taking refuge in the forest throughout his youth. Prison Photography on the road Pete Brook Four scanned photographs bought on the market in Rotterdam, some remarks, thirty-one connected questions and one answer that leaves all options open Andrea Stultiens Sometimes I make photographs. Usually I know why I make them, what I want to see, what I want to show. Often I also know to whom I want to show what I photographed. Sometimes I find photographs on flea markets. Usually they were made by a member of an easily identifiable group of people, and got orphaned. Occasionally I buy these photos, especially when there are many, and buy the promise of possible connections waiting to be discovered. Sometimes I photograph photographs because I don't own them and they should stay where they are, but I want to have them nonetheless. This has become very easy with the availability of good small digital cameras. Once I have appropriated these photographs, I can share them with others who also should have access to them. Photographs can help us to think about the way we deal with the world around us, but for that they need to be seen. Every day I look at photographs. They show me many things, but they never cease to ask questions. 1 What do you want when you make a photograph? 2 What do you want when you allow someone to photograph you? 3 Is it all about what happens in front of the camera? 4 Is something shared by showing it? 5 Is it all about the result of the act of photographing? 6 7 8 9 10 Why do others want to see a photograph? Because what they see amazes them? Because they see something that is unknown to them? Because they see something known that needs a closer look? Is the photograph worth a closer look? 11 Does the photograph speak to me? 12 Does the intention behind the photograph speak to me? 13 Who is in control when it comes to a photograph? 14 Who decides what a photograph looks like? 15 Who owns what the photographs shows? 16 Is the photograph spectacular enough? 17 Is the photograph too spectacular? 18 19 20 21 22 When are people willing to see? Is what is photographed wrapped in a seductive appearance? Does the photograph look like many other photographs, while still being different? What is different? Different for who? 23 Does the photograph contain information? 24 When is what is photographed information? 25 How much do you need to know in order to understand what you see? 26 Is it okay for a photograph to have a life of its own? 27 Is it okay when a photograph is misunderstood? 28 Is the photograph no longer what it was, when it is misunderstood? 29 Do you want to remember a specific moment? 30 Do you want this moment to last forever? 31 Do you want to escape the moment? Student of a Prison Photography on the Road workshop, Sing Sing Prison, NY, November 2011 � Tim Matsui (http://www.timmatsui.com) 10 02 30 04 50 06 70 08 90 10 11 12 31 14 51 16 71 18 The photograph captures something, and releases it from time. Beautyschool Carla Before going to court, Jose meets with his public defender, grandmother, probation officer and mental health worker. All of whom are to show their support to the judge. Santa Clara County Juvenile Court. San Jose, CA, 1999. Paybacks Scar Valley State Prison for Women Sye Williams prison photography on the road Pete Brook http://prisonphotography .wordpress.com and activities could survive when cut loose from the desk. Maybe my voice would thrive? Maybe the blog would wilt? Might Prison Photography mature? Face-to-face, would people answer questions differently to how they would in an email or phone-call? Would proximity in the real world be enough to secure new insights? When you meet someone in person, share tea and break bread, conversation goes beyond the realms of a professional email exchange. I was a journalist of sorts, but I was also a new ally to many of my interviewees. We shared our thoughts about prison reform which, let's be honest, is not a trendy or mainstream issue. At some point the audio recorder would emerge from my bag and threaten to disrupt the relaxed to-and-fro. But ultimately, the interview was a shared challenge; a mutual obligation, not an interrogation. Some interviewees were naturals. Others spluttered. The blinking red light atop the audio recorder could in some cases block thoughts and freeze voices. That said, where all interviewees found their groove was when they spoke about their firsthand experiences. Paradoxically, personal reflection seems to blossom in the company of others. Sye Williams and Joseph Rodriguez both place themselves deep within their work. Learning about them as individuals and learning about their work was one and the same. Behind all photography is a photographer. And next to a photographer is his or her subjects. Photography is about people and so was PPOTR. Sye and Joseph are different types of photographers. Sye makes his money from commercial assignments with sports magazines. Joseph pursues documentary projects about social exclusion, community, struggles and success in working America; Sye will tell you himself he is not a prison expert - he's never been to prison and is not from a community blighted by incarceration. Joseph, on the other hand, grew up brown in New York city in the sixties. His community was susceptible to the long reach of the law. Between 1968 and 1970, Joseph spent two stints inside Rikers Island Jail. Sye was crippled with nerves when asked to talk about prisons. Joseph, by contrast, was in his element. In the past, Sye has slipped into character to report and photograph sub-cultures such as amateur boxing (He even got in the ring ... twice!). Joseph has always been "inside" the subjects of his documentary photography. Both men understand how education, parenting, policing and imprisonment relate, but only Joseph is confident enough to draw and state conclusions. Sye is shy. Sye, in 2000, went to the Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW), Chowchilla California to photograph the conspicuous women he knew he would meet. His first impression was that the prison looked like a vocational college. Still, Sye says, "I didn't see a lot of optimism. Everyone always talked about coming back." Over five days, Sye and his assistants had virtual unhindered access. Sye cherrypicked the striking female prisoners and, JUVENILE Joseph Rodriguez The mugshot and New York jail booking-card of photographer Joseph Rodriguez dated 10.23.1968. Joseph Rodriguez Sarah holds her first child, Irie. Lance caresses her. San Andreas, California 2000. Weapons for one another. Our discussion veered from the Occupy Movement to Gene Smith to the August riots in London. Joseph would always come back to the same point: everyone, no matter who they are or what they do, needs a voice. Joseph sees the need in immigrant youth in Sweden, he sees it in East Los Angeles and he knows it about himself. For Joseph, kids don't need anti-gang policing specialists; they need someone to train them in multimedia. Until they can tell their own stories, Joseph can at least help his subjects speak their truth to power. He does this because 40 years ago he needed it too. And he needs it today. "I have to be honest and say my photography is about me," says Joseph. "Once you're an addict you're always and addict, so you don't forget what those experiences are about. I mean you can; you try to. Some people don't want to talk about it. In my case, this was just a part of my identity, an important part of my identity. I remember as a child looking at my stepfather coming home from prison. He was an addict. I got familiar with what the whole concept of prison means. You can be in an apartment in Brooklyn and be in prison. Just through what you see and what experiences are around you - poverty and theft." Joseph started photographing shortly after his second stint at Rikers. "As a child I felt powerless. What photography does for Joe? It is gives him power. But with that power comes responsibility. I began to learn that responsibility in Spanish Harlem, much more so in East Side Stories and on and on, it keeps going." 01 Joseph is there for the under-represented. Accidentally, Sye was too. Sye was not and is not a prison rights activist, but the project had its effect. He speaks fondly and with wonder about the women and the lives they came from. Sye showed me his handcrafted cardboard placards with contact sheet cutout images individually pasted down. Captions were written in felt-tip pen. They were almost devotional objects. Sye's curiosity has him wondering what has happened to the women in the ten years since the project. Given the opportunity, he would like to make portraits of them now (whether they are incarcerated or not), a decade on, and catch up on their stories. As I was leaving Sye's studio, he was at his laptop attempting to reconnect with the ladies on Facebook. Over a 90 day period during the Autumn of 2011, I drove 12,500 miles across 30 states. I interviewed 39 photographers and 28 prison reform experts. I made 3 prison visits and delivered 6 college lectures. Throughout, I was given food and shelter by people from the photography community. As I worked, I met impressive people and, as I relaxed, I met impressive people. Two of those impressive people were photographers Joseph Rodriguez and Sye Williams; our interactions can be said to be indicative of the spirit of the road trip. In the two years prior to setting off, on the blog Prison Photography, I'd written about incarceration, photographs and the territory in which the two intersect. The trip was Prison Photography on the Road, or PPOTR for short. After two years of writing, my blog had won some recognition - partly for my commentary, mostly for the images of others, but probably also because it was also such an accidentally brilliant brand. Prisons AND Photography! Among photography circles, I became known as the guy that did stuff about prisons. No one else was. PPOTR was a test to see if my writing 02 Lockdown as if for an advertising campaign, shot portraits and double portraits of graphic certainty. For me it was a lesson to witness Sye's modesty and demeanor as it compared to the strength and boldness of his images. I met Sye very early in the trip and this pleasant contrast between the photos and the person would be repeated time and time again during PPOTR. Speaking with Joseph, one wonders what he would be doing if he had not picked up a camera in his early twenties. It seems like he and photography were destined A letter to Joseph Rodriguez from Eddie Eustace, an incarcerated youth Rodriguez met while photographing Juvenile in 2000. Pete Brook interviewing Joseph Rodriguez (photo: Jack Jeffries). Holliday Unit Huntsville, TX State Prison 2001 Stephen Tourlentes Auburn, NY State Prison 2003 Stephen Tourlentes Carson City, NV Death House 2002 Stephen Tourlentes Interview Stephen Tourlentes My best guess is I've photographed close to 100 prisons so far. How do you choose the prisons to photograph? Pete Brook http://prisonphotography .wordpress.com /2009/02/28/the-feedback-of-exile-interview-withstephen-tourlentes/ Stephen Tourlentes photographs prisons I stumbled onto photographing prisons when they built one in the Illinois town in which I grew up. It took me awhile to recognize this as a path to explore. I noticed that the new prison visually changed the horizon at night. I began to notice them more and more when I traveled and my curiosity got the best of me. There is lots of planning that goes into it but I rely on my instinct ultimately. The Internet has been extremely helpful. There are three main paths to follow: 1. State Departments of Corrections 2. The Federal Bureau of Prisons 3. Private prisons. Usually, I look for the density of institutions from these sources and search for the cheapest plane ticket that would land me near them. Structurally the newer prisons are very similar so it's the landscape they inhabit that becomes important in differentiating them from each other. Photographing them at night has made illumination important. Usually medium and maximumsecurity prisons have the most perimeter lighting. Male institutions often tend to have more lighting than female institutions even if the security level is the same. You have described the prison as an "Important icon" and as a "General failure of our society." Can you expand on those ideas? Well the sheer number of prisons built in America over the last 25 years has put us in a league of our own regarding the number of people incarcerated. We have chosen to lock up people at the expense of providing services to children and schools that might have helped to prevent such a spike in prison population. The failure is being a reactive rather than a proactive society. I feel that the prison system has become a social engineering plan that in part deals with our lack of interest in developing more humanistic support systems for society. It seems that America's prison industrial complex is an elephant in the room. Are the American public (and, dare I say it, taxpayers) in a state of denial? I don't know if it's denial or fear. It seems that it is easier to build a prison in most states than it is a new elementary school. Horrific crimes garner headlines and seem to monopolize attention away from other types of social services and infrastructure that might help to reduce the size of the criminal justice system. This appetite for punishment as justice often serves a political purpose rather than finding a preventative or rehabilitative response to societies ills. How do you think artistic ventures such as yours perform as means to bring the issue of prison expansion into the public sphere? Compared to political will and legal policy, let's say? I think artists have always participated in bringing issues to the surface through their work. It's a way of bearing witness to something that collectively is difficult to follow. Sometimes an artist's interpretation touches a different nerve and if lucky the work reverberates longer than the typical news cycle. In your attempt with this work to "connect the outside world with these institutions," what parameters define that attempt a success? Have you identified different reactions from different prison authorities, in different states, to your work? The guards tend not to appreciate when I am making the images unannounced. Johan Smischteboem Sometimes I'm on prison property but often I'm on adjacent land that makes for interesting interactions with the people http://link_same_as that live around these institutions. I've qrcode.com/inter view had my share of difficult moments and it makes sense why. The warden at Angola prison in Louisiana was by far the most hospitable which surprised me since I arrived unannounced. What percentage of prisons do you seek permission from before setting up your equipment? I usually only do it as a last resort. I've found that the administrative side of navigating the various prison and state officials was too time consuming and difficult. They like to have lots of information and exact schedules that usually don't sync with the inherent difficulty of making an interesting photograph. I make my life harder by photographing in the middle of the night. The third shift tends to be a little less PR friendly. What would you expect the reaction to be to your work in the `prison-towns' that is town's that have come to specifically to rely on the prison for their local economy? You know it's interesting because a community that is willing to support a prison is not looking for style points, they want 03 jobs. Often I'm struck by how people accept this institution as neighbors. I stumbled upon a private prison while traveling in Mississippi in 2007. I was in Tutweiler, MS and I asked a local if that was the Parchman prison on the horizon. He said no that it was the "Hawaiian" prison. All the inmates had been contracted out of the Hawaiian prison system into this private prison recently built in Mississippi. The town and region are very poor so the private prison is an economic lifeline for jobs. The growth of the prison economy reflects the difficult economic policies in this country that have hit small rural communities particularly hard. These same economic conditions contribute to populating these prisons and creating the demand for new prisons. Unfortunately, many of these communities stake their economic survival on these places. Stephen Tourlentes received his BFA from Knox College and an MFA (1988) from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he is currently a professor of photography. His work is included in the collection at Princeton University, and has been exhibited at the Revolution Gallery, Michigan / Cranbook Art Museum, Michigan and S.F. Camerawork, among others. Tourlentes has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Polaroid Corporation Grant, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. This interview was originally published as The Feedback of Exile: Interview with Stephen Tourlentes, in Prison Photography (Feb 28th, 2009) only at night when they illuminate the horizon. In the pitch dark, the prisons' unnatural glows loom - just as the fear and division loomed over US politics in the 80s and 90s to fuel rapid prison growth. The nocturnal halogen buzz of Tourlentes' prisons encroaches upon our outside world; quite an affront given our zealous and expensive attempts to make our outside world "safe" by building more and more prisons. Even when you lock inconvenient fact in concrete, it won't go away. And so, as we wrap our collected psychosocial fears, ignorance and denial in ever more sophisticated architectures and systems of discipline, the feedback of those systems becomes ever more stark. "The light is a bit like sonic feedback ... maybe it's the feedback of exile," wonders Tourlentes. You've been photographing prisons since 1996. In how many states have you photographed? I've photographed in 46 states. Quite the trip considering many of the places I photograph are located on dead-end roads. I'm not sure it ever is ... I guess that's part of what drives me to respond to these places. These prisons are meant to be closed systems; so my visual intrigue comes when the landscape is illuminated back by a system (a prison) that was built by the world outside its boundaries. It's a bit like sonic feedback... maybe it's the feedback of exile. Many of your prints are have the moniker "Death House" in them, explain this. I find it difficult to comprehend that in a modern civilized society that state sanctioned executions are still used by the criminal justice system. The Death House series became a subset of the overall project as I learned more about the American prison system. There are 38 states that have capital punishment laws on the books.* Each of the 38 states has one prison where these sentences are carried out. I became interested in the idea that the law of the land differed depending on a set of geographical boundaries. 04 * The number of states practicing executions was 38 at the time of the interview it is now 36, and continues to fluctuate. Do you think you got some photographs precisely because you were without a staff chaperone? Had a guard been there, the weapons almost certainly wouldn't have come out. The prisoners were used to a photographer coming in from the local paper, and the warden would say that faces couldn't be shown. So the photographer would direct and say to prisoners, "I'm going to go outside the cell. You put your hands through the bars." And half an hour later he'd be gone. I go there, come back, spend the whole day, every day for a week. Leave, make prints, send them down, return six months later. They trusted me and were also using me too. It was a way for them to get in the face of the authorities. After a while they'd start bringing things out, "Hey, you want to see a guy with a needle in his arm?" Did you develop a plan or approach? I had no clue what I was going to do with the pictures. When I started photographing I didn't want to be a photographer, I just wanted to have experiences. At the prisons, photography started to insisting on itself. When I was photographing at a carnival, I was thinking "How would Bruce Davison take this?" and it ruined it. When I was in prison, I wasn't thinking that way. Do your images still have any relevance? Is there anything to learn from these? Can they teach anything? Not a about prisons, not about justice, not about systems. But about what it is to be that kind of human. What it might be like to be around that type of human. What it feels like to be there. I could get into that skin and I can slip back out again. If I can slip in, then maybe someone else can too? I would go back to photograph in prisons, possibly, but not in America. I like a certain type of light and my guess is, that it's very difficult to find that type of light anymore, because modern prisons are so evenly lit. I prefer an 1868 building with high bars across high windows. Light is a big part of the prison pictures. Modern detention centers look like corridors in an airport to me. What I think is interesting, is being present and allowing yourself to see things. This is where good art comes from. It happens before you even touch a camera. Was your work in prisons a disciplined self-assigned challenge or an adrenaline kick? Adrenaline kick all the way. Pure narcotic. I think there's something very specific that happens when you have an artistic moment. A "Yes!" moment when you have a release of dopamine in your brain and everything lines up and everything flows clearly. That's always what it has been about for me. I've nothing to say about prisons. `From Prison' book available: http://www.blurb.com /bookstore/detail/ 607153 Prison tattoo on butt Mirror on the cellblock Sean Kernan was a youngster dabbling with the medium when he photographed at West Virginia State Penitentiary and an Alabama prison throughout 1978 and `79. None of it was planned and there was never a goal for the images. Kernan's Prison has only recently been self-published, but for all intents and purposes his images are his naive exploration and discoveries staring back at us, which makes them all the more remarkable. Pete Brook and Sean Kernan spoke in November, 2011 at Kernan's Connecticut home. interview Sean Kernan Pete Brook Prisoner with cat How did you end up photographing inside prison? It was really like a lightning bolt. I was driving through West Virginia coming home from on a failed project about carnival workers. I decided to do back roads for a bit and was passing through Moundsville, West Virginia. Down a street I saw this looming, crenelated, old-time structure. It was the prison and I thought, "What have I got to lose?" I went up and knocked on the door, and asked to see the warden. I was ushered into his office. I said I'd like to take some pictures, and I inflated my importance saying I'd worked for LOOK magazine and TIME magazine, which was marginally true. The warden gave me a guard and we went down to the yard. I met an interesting looking inmate and we went into a stairwell and took some photographs. When I got home and developed the film, I just thought that was the best picture I'd ever taken up to that point. What was interesting, was that I'd gotten out of the way; for that moment, I'd stopped trying to take interesting pictures. I wrote and asked permission to return and I spent a week unsupervised in West Virginia State Penitentiary. PRISON Sean Kernan Sean Kernan holds a painting by Willie Lewis. The pose is a repeat of that struck by Lewis, a prisoner that Kernan photographed in 1979. Lewis gave Kernan the painting as a gift. Untitled Jeff Barnett-Winsby 2008 SERIES: Love is a Battlefield Love is a Battlefield, Jeff Barnett-Winsby Pete Brook http://www.jbwphoto.com/ Willie Lewis 05 Jeff Barnett-Winsby is an artist and arts community coordinator based in Wassaic, New York. He has shot three projects in American prisons. The first was of shrines and devotion possessions of men in single occupancy maximum-security cells. The second project was double portraits of prisoners and the dogs they were training as part of a Puppies Behind Bars program to train guide-dogs for the blind and partially sighted. Due to exceptional events, Jeff went on to make a book about an escaped prisoner and the director of the puppy program who eloped and lived as fugitives for 11 days. Jeff followed their trail and gathered ephemera relating to their relationship before, during and after the escape. Since that national news event, Jeff has been "really interested in love." Working once again in Kansas, Jeff sought out couples who met specific criteria. In each of his marriage portraits, one of the couple is incarcerated and will never be released. Furthermore, in each case, the couples met while the one was incarcerated. They have met, fallen in love, and married all within the context of one partner's incarceration. "They have no hope of being together in the outside world. They'll never have the opportunity to consummate the marriage," says Jeff, "I think that gets at the heart of what I want to talk about." "I think the act of photographing and the act of asking why they got married has the potential to be a larger conversation about what it means to be human: why we do the things that we do, and what the role of love is in life," explains Jeff. "Love is not always socio-economic or related to cultural heritage; maybe there's something else going on," says Jeff. As you can imagine, subjects are not commonplace, "In Kansas I only found five couples [that fit the criteria] and I could only get four of them to sit for their portraits," explains Jeff. "My attempts to reach out to other state prison systems has been met with an absolute wall in terms of access. It's been really hard." Over his many projects, Jeff has come to appreciate that the photographic process is not separate from the prison's own security process. "As a photographer, you have to operate within established authority barriers (when working in a prison) for your safety and for your permission to enter, so in that way you are complicit. If you're not thinking about that, you're missing the point. However, there's slippage that happens within that. One of the things I love about photography, is that I feel I'm not smart enough to see everything in the picture, so even if I'm really setting everything up, I'm going to miss a connection." Jeff continues, "That connection will only be seen later in the editing process. I think it's that failure of monitoring during the time of creation that allows for these strange and unpredictable observations to come through. That's the real message, that's the real value and that's the thing that happens. A lot of photographers would be reluctant to say that, because it makes you sound stupid and makes you sound like you don't know what's going on - and to some degree you don't - but for me that's where the value comes in for me in all the projects I've done in prisons. It's that weird slippage." How did you move around the prison? Were you supervised? Totally unsupervised. I don't think that ever happens, does it? And here, this door just popped open for me. When I arrived the first scheduled visit, the warden said, "We have a problem. I don't have a guard to give you." I looked sadder than I actually was. "There's one thing I could do," he said, "I could give you an inmate. He could show you around." He calls in a prisoner called Ron Buntz, and say to him, "Ron, this here is Sean Kernan. He's a photographer, but I ain't got a staff to show him round, so I said he could go with an inmate and you're the man." As we stepped out the office, Ron turned to me and said, "Let's get one thin clear." "What's that?" I asked. "I ain't an inmate," insisted Ron, "I'm a convict." We had a really interesting relationship. He was the one to get signatures on the release forms because no-one could refuse Ron Buntz. 06 " If a prison gets bad press, it is near impossible to fight back or mount a public campaign in sound bites, quite simply because the issues surrounding prisons are so complex. In a free, first-world country that locks up as many people as we do, and spends the money we do, and to look at the strange sentencing guidelines that determines who is sentenced and who walks free, it's just not something someone can talk about without 500 pages in a book." A prisoner drops his pants to reveal a scar on his groin UnTitled Unnamed These pinhole photographs are the result of a collaboration between photographer Steve Davis and the girls of Remann Hall Juvenile Detention Center, Tacoma, Washington State in the US. interview STEVE DAVIS Pete Brook http://prisonphotography .wordpress.com /2009/07/21/capturedyouth-an-interview-withsteve-davis-part-one/ In four facilities in Washington State - Maple Lane, Green Hill School, Oakridge and Remann Hall � photographer Steve Davis made his own portraits and, during workshops, gave youth the opportunity to make their own photographs. We spoke about the challenges and motivations of working in juvenile lock-ups. Why photograph incarcerated kids? I was interested in trying to zero in on these kids as individual personalities and open up a lot of questions within the viewer. I wasn't trying to force anything down anybody's throat. I was just acknowledging that this juvenile prison is 20 miles from my home. Tell us about making the portraits. The motivation of these kids to have their picture taken was overwhelming. They all knew that their portraits were to go into a catalog, and that the photos would be published and shown. I went in with a bit of theater; I had a large camera, I had lights and I had an assistant. So they were just begging to get their picture taken. It wasn't hard at all. Can you talk about a few of them? One kid. Nicest guy but a total white racist. Once you got to know him, you fell into his world. Had as many black friends as white, but if you asked him he would've told you what his views were. He was basically raised to be a white racist. There was one kid who the staff said, "He should not be here." He was a Mexican " Inside, everything is bright and fully exposed. Everyone is watched. The residents are here for committing crimes, but bad luck and accidents of birth contribute to the likelihood of imprisonment. who got busted for being a drugs mule from Mexico. Apparently, some rivals burnt his house down. He couldn't or wouldn't speak English. He was scared and totally out of his element. But over about three months, he started playing the role of the tough guy and you saw this transition. He was becoming what he was assumed to be to begin with - a hard guy. It was sad. Many of the kids look very somber, but in fact they'd be laughing their heads off a lot of the time. One thing I learnt from putting the work out is that people respond to these portraits for their own reasons. A lot of the reasons have nothing to do with prisons or justice. Some of them like pictures of handsome young boys; they like to see beautiful people, or vulnerable people, whatever. That started to blow my mind after a while. Tell us about the objectives of the workshops? To describe what life was like and treat the camera as a photojournalist would. They had a story to tell and they had an audience they were supposed to reach. Once I was there, I quickly realized most of these kids have never completed a project of any description. Photography was secondary. They just needed something to do as a group that might actually have some kind of consequence. It wasn't hard to get them to agree that the group as a whole took credit for each picture. And they were all okay with that. I'd print them, take them back and show them. The group would edit them and they'd feel part of the process. So always willing participants? Yes! The goal at Maple Lane was to create a large mixed media exhibition that would go into the local high schools. So the (incarcerated) kids would present their own lives. The message for the young exhibition viewers was generally, "You don't want this life". The incarcerated kids understood that and got behind it. Of all the workshops, the pinhole photographs from Remann Hall are my favorites. Tell us. Remann Hall would not allow the photographing of faces. So, I gave them pinhole cameras, which ran on long exposures. The girls had to plan the shot. They were thinking in terms of illustration and performance for the camera. It wasn't about trying to document as much as create these worlds for the camera. Did the staff need education too? In some facilities, it was a huge struggle at the start of the project, especially when staff would confiscate the cameras as a form of punishment. As soon as I left the building, they'd take the cameras away. That part was really hard. There was a whole education process that had to go on with the staff too; they weren't used to cameras being there. I explained my view and then get the management on my side, which would then explain to the staff and sanction the activity. The photographs were all censored at the end. 07 I was amazed at Green Hill School by the amount of support they gave me. I went into the Intensive Management Unit (IMU), which is the lock down wing. I thought they weren't likely to let me in there, but I approached the management Johan Smischteboem anyway. I explained I really needed to take pictures of the IMU and that I didn't want to make it pretty. The administrator said `Yes', which really blew me away. The staff at the IMU was just excited that someone came out to visit, because that place was usually off limits. In the IMU, kids would get a chair only if they were still enrolling themselves in school; they had their own choice if they wanted to be enrolled in school. If they acted up, which many did because they were locked up 23/7, their mattress was taken away and they'd sleep on the cement. And if there was more trouble than that, staff would strip them, and if there was more trouble than that, chain them up in the fetal position. Seriously? I'm serious. This is what I was told by staff. They told me they were cleaning up their act. This was 2000, so that may well be true. Were these juveniles in the IMU because they were violent offenders or were they there because they'd broken prison rules? Because they'd broken prison rules. It was punishment? Yes, but part of understanding this is also getting accurate information. I was told they put people there for their own protection. There was one kid, a pedophile, who was apparently there for his own protection, but then I was told later that that wasn't the case. "Oh, you can't do that [type of separation]." One would think prisons could run protective cells and wings without resorting to these stark punitive environments? I am shocked to learn that juveniles are in isolation. Some kids told me they'd go to IMU because they just wanted to get away, and some of them would only be there for two or three days. But some of them would be there for months. One member of staff was extremely bitter. He said in front of everybody, "I could solve this problem easily, I'd just get a gun." And this is how he'd talk to these kids! Years ago they had tables in the open hallway, and a TV and pool table. Once the kids took the pool balls, beat the staff with them, and broke the television. So they removed all these things just because the staff was scared. They told me one woman couldn't go back to work because her arm was damaged. And so you realize it is very complicated. These people come to work everyday and they don't want to be constantly threatened with violence. Of course, the kids I photographed had nothing to do with that but had to pay the consequences. Did the kids get copies of their portraits? Yes. They had empty rooms, but they'd have maybe a few pictures on the wall that they were allowed to have. It was a huge deal for them to have these pictures. Photographs were important. I'd heard from a colleague that she met one kid (from before I worked there) who had never even seen a photograph. I'm thinking, "He must have seen a photograph?" but some of these kids have backgrounds that are so hard to imagine. I'm struck by the simultaneous vacuity of these institutions and the intensity and passion found in the faces of its young residents. It is these faces that I asked to do the talking. There is more to learn from the eyes than from the architecture. There are exceptions. The Green Hill School's Intensive Management Unit, for example, demanded my attention as the most inhumane living environment I ever witnessed. It is my hope that as viewers look at these images, they consider some of the messy and complicated issues surrounding such a great number of young people who live, laugh, and suffer in exile." Steve Davis Statement for `Captured Youth' " I'd heard from a colleague that she met one kid who had never even seen a photograph. Some of these kids have backgrounds that are so hard to imagine." 08 This is an edited version of an interview conducted by Pete Brook and originally published in two parts (July 21st and July 23rd, 2009) on Prison Photography. Boys in intake, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, Downey, CA. "Time-out room" in the education wing, South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility, South Bend, IN. Female juvenile meth addict, Caldwell Southwest Idaho Juvenile Detention Center, Caldwell, ID. Orleans Parish Prison, New Orleans, LA. It is a hot August day in New Orleans. The A/C here is broken, there was a fight the night before and so all privileges have been revoked --TV, books, cards. There are 23 boys here now, 2 per cell, which at its narrowest portion measures 6' wide. Challenge Program, El Paso, TX. A female inmate having her cell searched. In the Challenge Program they search the cells randomly every day. JUVENILE-in-JUSTICE Richard Ross 40+ years of photography to create a database of compelling images to instigate policy reform. My products are unbiased photographic and textual evidence of a system that houses more than 100,000 kids every day. http://www.juvenile-injustice.com/ Juvenile-In-Justice will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Fall of 2012 and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY, in 2013. 09 King County Youth Service Center, Seattle, WA. D, age 16, this is his third time here. St. Louis Detention Center, St. Louis, MO View of camera monitoring the isolation cell. Juvenile Detention, Greenville, Mississippi. Books are only permitted in the classrooms, not in the cells. Male inmates are in the front of the classroom and a young woman seeking asylum at the facility sits in the back. An officer guards the door. Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, Mendota, WI. For mentally and emotionally disturbed juveniles. A trap in the door for security and meals. Juvenile-In-Justice documents the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. My medium is a conscience. For the past five years, I have interviewed and photographed both pre-adjudicated and committed youth in the juvenile justice system. To date, I have interviewed and photographed over 1,000 juveniles and administrators at 300+ facilities in 30 states in the U.S. I have made sure to keep the children's identities unknown, by either photographing them from behind or obscuring their faces. I have photographed group homes, police departments, youth correctional facilities, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, shelters, Montessori classrooms, CPS interview rooms, and maximum security lock-down and non-lock-down shelters, to name a few. Earl Dunlap, the Director of Cook County Detention Center, welcomed me to his facility with the words: "Welcome to the gates of hell." In the past I have photographed for major magazines, newspapers and institutions. At this phase in my career I am turning my lens towards the juvenile justice system and using what I have learned in 10 Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center, Biloxi, Mississippi B.T, age 12, in a cell he shares with another boy. question mark] and there [the exclamation point], that's the question, what I'm trying to figure out. I'm trying to figure out why I'm here. When I know that, it won't be a question anymore." He was sweating, leaning over his hoe. He was as much musing to himself as to me, looking out over the fields of wheat as he talked. There were guards sitting on horseback with shotguns resting against there hips watching over the field of prisoners. I photographed the guards too. I asked him what his sentence was for, but he didn't tell me. "I got letters," he said. meaning he has a LIFE sentence, rather than a specific number of years. He'll die at Angola, he said. ... I photographed a couple of men outside in the fenced-in yard off the back of the hospice unit. A cat had found and killed a sumptin'?" one inmate asked. "What's this for?" he demanded. I said it is a story in photographs about daily life in the prison, a "documentary" about their lives. "Oh, oh a documentary," a man said, as if he'd just learned the word and was having trouble with it's meaning. I'm losing touch with the meaning of the word. I wonder if the man who asked me if I was going to use my camera to represent him as a "beast," if he did not himself feel mostly like an animal-caged, lined up, corralled, told what to do, fed, his most basic needs taken care of, worked, coerced, yelled at, prodded, urged. September 6, 2000 Angola, Louisiana and Oxford, Mississippi At lunch one day in the warden's ranch house an officer asked me, "You havin' fun here?" And, I answered, "No, not really." He seemed surprised. "Then why you doin' it then?" he asked, reprimanding me. I still haven't answered what I'm doing there, why I'm putting all this energy into this work? Especially when I don't get any joy out of being inside the prison. If anything it's a strain. "This is kind of like your autobiography," one prisoner said, challenging me to think more deeply about the work I'm doing. He said he wouldn't allow me to photograph him, because it wasn't about him, it was about me. He said the images wouldn't really express anything about their lives, but would only be a reflection of my own thought, feeling, history. My work would not benefit them, he said. "You goin' get paid?" a man asked, like a lot of men I've seen here. "You goin' make millions off of us." Another inmate in his cell told me explicitly that he didn't want to be photographed because he didn't want to be exploited. Brian Citrey Jonathan Ennis Adam Shemper mouse and was eating it in the yard. No one paid any attention to the cat. I soon realized, two of the three men were blind and couldn't see. One of the blind men let me photograph him. [...] He had a blue glass eye he wanted me to photograph. Like a lot PORTRAITS OF INVISIBLE MEN: LOUISIANA STATE PENITENTIARY, ANGOLA NOTEBOOK Adam Shemper http://prisonphotography .wordpress.com/2011/ 10/10/ppotr-dispatch-1inter view-with-adam-shemper/with-adam-shemper/ January 31, 2000 St. Francisville, Louisiana First day photographing at Angola. Full of doubt. Prisoners stare � seer being seen. Feeling unsettled. As a photographer I'm used to hiding, to making images from the edge, from the outside. I'm anxious coming into relationship so directly. Most of the black men I spoke with were conscious of their history of oppression. They were still living it, and talked frankly about their pain and suffering as black men. "This here is slavery," one man said. "This ain't nothing' but a big ol' slave plantation," another said. "Somebody makin' a lot of money here." They speak as victims of a brutal, racist system. Many of the men talk about their powerlessness and dispossession. Their lives were never in their control, they tell me, always under the thumb of the white man, in a racist system. The white man, including me, is the responsible party, but we surely won't take responsibility, I'm told. Without power, there's no way to be selfresponsible, I'm learning here. This prison, like other prisons in the U.S. is the damage of a racist, classist system. I see this in its most extreme, exaggerated form in the inmates at Angola. Very few of them will take responsibility for their lives, for their crimes of inmates he wanted a particular part of himself represented. He spoke loud, like a man hard of hearing, about the injustices done to him. He kept telling me he had a story. "I've got a story," he said. "I've got a story for you. Too bad you only photographing, because I've got some words. This is hell." Being in prison and being blind. " "You know what kills me, is not having a woman. That's the hardest thing. When I had my sight, I'd look at girlie magazines, but because I've been in her so long, all I see is gal-boys." He was talking about feminine or dominated men in the prison. "I can't even get women in my fantasies. All I see is gal-boys. It's hell." He said he was blinded in a fight with another prisoner and hoped to regain it if he could get an operation. All he could see now were shadows. "Nothing else," he said, "Just shadows." Collard greens ara oshagen A Poor Imitation of Death Pete Brook http://prisonphotography .wordpress.com/tag/ a-poor-imitation-of-death/ December 16, 2000 Oxford, Mississippi I spoke with Cathy (the prison official who handles media) on the phone yesterday. I'm trying to make sure I can finish the project this coming year with interviews in March. She said there wasn't a problem with me coming back to interview. She did tell my 11 March 20, 2000 Greenwood Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana I see the mostly black men I photographed today bent over pulling collard greens from stalks. I felt more confident this time, more settled. I was also less articulate about what I was doing there when men asked. At times I just didn't have an answer. "I don't know," I said and wanted to say more than I did. March 21, 2000 St. Francisville, Louisiana I'm having to omit a lot. There are inmates and events that I'm not allowed (or discouraged) against photographing. So much happens here I won't see, my camera won't record, so much the administration and warden don't want me to see. ... and sins. They languish in victimhood. And the more I talk to men here, particularly black men, the more I understand the reasons for that. From the warden's point of view, it's simple, these are "selfish" men who take from others, have no moral code. During the bible college graduation he said learning to be moral, to think of others, was everything. For him, it seems, the system has nothing to do with race. ... Out in the open field, with men slinging ditch bank hoes, cutting grass, one man showed me a question mark on his left forearm. When I asked him what it was about, he said, "All of this," and pointed to the land around us, the men working, chopping weeds. "This is the question," he said, meaning existence. "And when I find the answer I'm gonna put an exclamation mark on my other arm. But everything between here [the my interviews could only be around the subject of prison life. "I don't want you to talk to `em about their crimes," she said. I told her it wasn't their crimes I wanted to talk about as much as their life before their crime. She said she didn't want me to talk to them about that either. "We can't validate that kind of information," she said. Essentially, I can only write about what the prison has control over, what is in their jurisdiction. She said talking to men about their crimes, about their lives before prison might elicit sympathy in the people viewing and reading the work, and that sympathy complicates matters especially when people might want to act on those feelings, she said. She's advocating partly for victims and their families, afraid my work might be portray the men in prison as too human, not as criminals. When Ara Oshagan was invited to shoot b-roll for a documentary film in the Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall, he didn't hesitate. "I had lunch with Leslie (Neale, a filmmaker) on Monday, and on Tuesday I was inside with my camera," says Oshagan. The film was Juvies. As an Armenian emigre living in LA, Oshagan was aware of California's bloated prison prison and jail systems, but had not thought about how he'd operate as a photographer within them. Previously, his approach was to spend years on his documentary projects often wandering and discovering. In LA Central Juvenile Hall, time was not a luxury ... and neither was space. "I had to keep the film crew out the frame." Over the 3 years of the project, Oshagan identified shortcomings in the ability of his photographs alone to describe the experience of the children. His solution? To pair images with poetry and prose of the six children he followed. When the kids got bumped up into the adult system he followed them there too. "I wanted this work to be about this passage. The adult system is a complete change in culture," says Oshagan. "The whole culture will take advantage of the younger kids coming in." Oshagan witnessed teenagers he knew as small boys, bulk-up in their first six months in the adult system. They told him how the first thing they learnt was how to make weapons to protect themselves. What surprised both he and his subjects was the length of sentences children are routinely given. And, after they move up through the system, their chances of a secure, violent-free life diminish. The real kicker? Oshagan concludes his own kids are not too dissimilar to those he photographed in lock up. It's not too difficult to imagine one poor decision and a life taken over by years of incarceration. Why does this matter? Well, not only are sentence-lengths for juveniles growing, in recent years many states (40 in total) have introduced laws to allow the trial of juveniles as adults. How is our society poised for the conversation on the culpability of under-18s and our shared capacity to manage and then forgive? To help the conversation, Oshagan is to shortly publish the photobook `A Poor Imitation of Death'. The title comes from one of the kids' description of imprisonment. A Poor Imitation of Death Ara Oshagan 12 Kenny Smith April 17, 2000 St. Francisville, Louisiana The men continue to ask me what I'm doing this for, how much will I make, who will this profit. I feel as lost as ever, unable to answer clearly. "You ain't gonna make us look like beasts, is you? Like animals or Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber are partin photography and in life. In 2008, shortly after completing a graduate program in Visual Communications, Tim and Jenn rented a cottage for the summer in La Grange, Kentucky. Tim documented the geriatric wing for prisoners, while Jenn photographed the Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit for prisoners with severe mental health problems. Ackerman's project Trapped and Gruber's series Served Out honed in on two of the most pressing human rights issues for prison reformers in America today. Medical health care and mental health care. Aging The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in May, 2011 that the California prisons system was unable to provide adequate health care. California is a touchstone for the U.S. because it has the largest prison population of any state. It was ruled that the 8th Amendment, which protects citizens against "cruel and unusual punishment", was not being upheld and the system was in violation of the constitutional rights of every prisoner. When healthcare systems in prisons begin to fail, it is the elderly that suffer first and most. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 ners http://ackerman gruber.com/ or older nearly quadrupled, while the number of all prisoners grew by less than half. The aging of the prison population brings with it massive costs and moral dilemmas. Is a prison the best places for people who are demonstrably infirm? Mentall illnes It is estimated that over one quarter of all US prisoners have a diagnosed mental illness. Often prisons are the inevitable end of the line for chronically mentally ill who have no safety net in free society. In a perverse ideology relating to the rhetoric of freedom, Reagan dismantled the mental health hospital system. No significant budget was set aside to pay for replacement care in the community. As a result, we have correctional professionals such as KSR warden, Larry Chandler who states "Prisons are the surrogate mental hospitals now." During her work, Ackerman noted the commitment of both medical staff and prisoner-volunteers who help keep suicide-watch, talk to patient-prisoners and administer daily treatment. As evidenced in her photographs, there are moments of extreme violence, confrontation, behavioral management and restraints; these scenes can look abusive, but they were always the last resort. Ackerman noted with some disconsolation that in fact the KSR psychiatric treatment wing was probably the best mental health care facility in the state. That is an indictment for society as a whole. tent city Jon Lowenstein Officer McUaugh poses for a picture at the Tent City Jail in Phoenix, Arizona in Maricopa County (2009). Undocumented Mexican Immigrants, Tent City (2009). Jenn Ackerman "We have to remind mental health staff of the policies to protect everyone," says Sergeant Rioux. "If the doctors say he doesn't need to be cuffed, we remind them that he does and that security comes first." Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit, Kentucky State Reformatory (2008). Tim Gruber Correctional Officer oversees the transportation of a geriatric prisoner, Kentucky State Reformatory (2008). tent city Jon Lowenstein http://www. noorimages.com/index. php?id=7877 13 Josue Enrique Vargas, Michoacan, Mexico worked as a home painter in the United States. He had been in the United States for five years when he was picked up for a DUI (drunk driving) arrest. (2009) " In 1993 Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio set up a "Tent City" as an extension of the Maricopa County Jail in an effort to tackle over-crowding without building a new jail. All inmates in Tent City are required to wear pink underwear and old fashioned striped jump suits. Since 2006 `America's Toughest Sheriff' as Arpaio likes to be called, has increasingly focused energy on the undocumented Latin American community in Maricopa County. The County Sheriff's office has approximately 162 federally trained 287(g) officers. Under 287(g), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) provides state and local law enforcement with the training and subsequent authorization to identify, process, and when appropriate, detain immigration offenders they encounter during their regular, daily lawenforcement activity. If an undocumented person is convicted of a crime, it is quite possible they serve their jail time in Tent City's O Yard. The O Yard houses the many of the undocumented prisoners who have been convicted of a crime in Maricopa County. Arpaio's office chooses to ensure that undocumented immigrants who are convicted of a crime serve their time before they are they turned over to federal immigration authorities to face immigration proceedings. Tent City is a medium security facility. Tent City is located in a yard next to a more permanent structure containing toilets, showers, an area for meals, and a day room. It has become notable particularly because of Phoenix's extreme temperatures. Daytime temperatures inside the tents have been reported as high as 150 �F (65 �C) in the top bunks. During the summer, fans and water are supplied in the tents. During the summer of 2003, when outside temperatures exceeded 110 �F (43 �C), which is higher than average, Arpaio said to complaining inmates, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents, have to wear full body armor, and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths." Inmates were given permission to wear only their pink underwear." Lloyd Degrane Pete Brook http://lloyddegrane.com /documentar y/prison.htm Lloyd Degrane is a gentle, unassuming, older gent. He worked diligently for an entire decade (1990-2000) within three Illinois prisons - the Joliet Receiving Center, the Stateville Maximum Security Prison and Cook County Jail (the largest walled facility in the world with approximately 11,000 inmates). Degrane did this without any fuss or anything approximating self-promotion. Before the authorities allowed him in with his camera, the Department of Corrections sent Degrane on a 600-mile roundtrip to Menard Prison, a maximum-security prison in Southern Illinois. At Menard, Degrane was to just have a tour of the facilities. The warden instructed him not to take in his camera, and said that they discuss with Degrane the proposed photography project after Degrane has taken the tour. Due to an extraordinary experience during his prison visit, Degrane never met the warden. The extraordinary experience did, however, give Degrane a bargaining chip with which to win access to the Illinois prison system. Degrane explains: Lockdown Protest, Stateville Correctional Center (1993). Lloyd Degrane and threw him against the bars. His head split open and he fell right at my feet. That was my initiation into maximum-security prison. I thought he was dead. I heard over the loudspeaker system "CIVILIAN INSIDE" and I looked at the guard who was in the cell with me and he pointed at me and he said, "That's you". About five minutes later I heard the state police come into the cellblock with kind of this chant from the Wizard of Oz. It was a chant to get everyone psyched up and strike fear into the heart of the rioting prisoners. They marched in with clubs and they were there to rescue me. They made a pathway through this insanity and extracted me from the cellblock along with the officer. They got me out of the cellblock back to the warden's office where I picked up my camera and just kind of pushed me out the back door. I went to the nearest tavern and had a couple of shots of whisky. The adrenaline was just incredible, to the point where I couldn't sit down. I'd nearly lost my life and I'd never had an experience like that before. Later that day, I contacted the communications officer for the Illinois Department of Corrections. He knew what had happened. He said, "If you don't talk to the media about what happened today then we'll send you into Stateville Prison," And so I didn't say anything. Two weeks later I got notice from the warden at Stateville that it was okay to come in and start the project." " I was led around Menard Prison by a guard that was just about to retire. You don't get comfortable for some time. On the yard, you're walking around brushing shoulders with murderers and rapists. I'd never been around people who had committed heinous crimes. We walked into a big cell house holding several hundred inmates. As we got to the centre of the cell house a race riot broke out around us. I later found out is was African American inmates who wanted to retaliate against a white biker gang for killing one of their own several weeks before, and we were right in the middle of that retaliation. I remember yelling and threats being directed at the guard I was with. I was wearing a white shirt at the time and prisoners stopped and looked at me as if to ask, "What is this guy doing here?" I ran with the guard through a gauntlet of muscular black inmates. We made it to a cell and inside the cell was one of the oldest inmates I'd ever seen � over seventy years of age. And the guard just pushed me inside the cell. And the race riot went into high gear then. The first thing I saw was a white biker gang member being beaten by four or five black prisoners and the beating got closer and closer to the cell I was in. One of the black prisoners picked up the white biker 14 " His head split open and he fell right at my feet. That was my initiation into maximum-security prison. I thought he was dead." During an LA Times assignment on a story about prison guards sexually abusing female prisoners in a town south of Atlanta, Suriani's eyes were opened to a world she'd only feared before. She vowed to return to document and engage the incarcerated women in her home state. Between 1993 and 1995, Marilyn Suriani photographed in the Metro Correctional Institute - a women's prison in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1994, she got hold of some Nikon cameras and conducted a six-week prison photography workshop. "The women had never really looked at themselves in this way before. The workshops gave them some sense of relevance in a world with no way out," says Suriani. Through her own portraits and interviews and through their own photographs, Suriani had given these women a voice. "We had planned an exhibit of the work in the gymnasium," explains Suriani. "A regime change occurred and a new warden took over. This was a time when prison, in general, had become leaner and meaner; nor more art programs, personal photos on wall or books in the rooms. The show was cancelled and the women were deprived the opportunity to see their photos enlarged and mounted. No matter how much pleading I did, new rules were new rules. That day I really learned something about what it was like to be in prison." Prisoner Nellie Mays (photo) describes the facts of her life. " I'm 45, Black American, 3 children, a 24 years old daughter and two sons aged 23 and 26. My daughter is a Registered Nurse, my oldest son a computer engineer, and my youngest son is just finishing Alabama State University in Political Science. I have 5 grandchildren. I am a single parent; my husband left me when my kids were 9 months, 1 year and 2 years. I worked two jobs, one of them for the U.S. Postal Service. I also worked the 3rd shift personnel staff. I believe in getting what I want myself. I'm not a dependent. I'm an independent person. I believe in helping others. My crime was the possession of cocaine. I had been selling drugs for 17 years; mostly crack or cocaine. My parent was a user. I wasn't into the drug business to get rich; I was in the business to get my kids through college and to help other kids to get their education. I was no fool, when I sold drugs. In my neighborhood I'm the Mom; I'm everybody's mother. I feed the hungry. I own houses. I take in the homeless people. I've never done drugs or alcohol. I've always sought help for the parent on drugs. I'm a volunteer at the convalescent home for the elderly. I'm president of the Peace & Harmony Club. I know that all of the good in the world can't make selling drugs all right. Now, that I'm getting older, and I have accomplished everything that I want to do by selling drugs I'm finished with the drug business. I have a degree in catering and interior decorating. I own my own restaurant on wheels. My grandchildren are my life. When I am released from prison, I'm planning on traveling with my grandchildren all over the world." Shae, who is 18 years of age and who has volunteered for the chain gang, learns that her 6 month year old daughter has been taken into child custody due to the fact that Shae is incarcerated. " You start thinking `Is this for real?' There's a priest and a nun, and there's women chained together burying a dead stranger in the middle of the desert." Nellie Mays, Metro Correctional Institute, Atlanta, Georgia (1994) A female chain gang member shows her "happy hooker" tattoo. Marilyn Suriani A small group bury a baby at White Tanks Cemetery in the Arizona desert. It was not clear who the babies parents were or what was the cause of death. Scott Houston Pete Brook Scott Houston first visited Tent City and Estrella Jail in Maricopa County in 2003 on assignment for a UK newspaper. That year, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was making headlines with his latest stunt, America's only all-female chain gang. In 2010, Houston returned to the story for TIME Magazine. Today, widely criticized by human rights groups including Amnesty International, Arpaio's Sheriffs Office is under Federal investigation for abuse-of-power, racial profiling, unconstitutional jail conditions and failure to cooperate with Federal authorities. Nowadays, it might seem his days are numbered, but when Houston photographed with the chain gangs, Arpaio was riding high. "In Arizona, Sheriff Joe makes prisoners clean parks, paint over graffiti and bury dead homeless people," says Houston, "They are a complete workforce. When you think that the prison population in the United States is over 2 million, that is a significant work force to tap into!" `Chained together, they labor eight hours a day, six days a week' states the Sheriff's website. Houston is worried it is fast becoming a case of exploited labour, "it becomes a business. Sheriff Joe is not finished. He has lots and lots of ideas he wants to implement." Houston would be right - the Sheriff's website boasts, `The office always has more requests for the JOBS: A Prison Reentry Program Harvey Finkle Women inmates, students at the Computer repair class established by the JOBS Project. Ramon Rosa at Home after his release. In his hometown Philadelphia, Harvey Finkle is an institution. Since the sixties he has used his camera in service of so- but what Davis really says is that you deal with housing and with healthcare, with jobs and crumbling neighborhoods. Deficiencies in those things are what put people in prison." The JOBS Project attends to these very real needs for ex-offenders and it changed the status quo. Upon release, "they used to hand you a token and your clothes, open the door, and wave you bye," describes Finkle. "The JOBS Program connects you with housing and with an organization that will find jobs." It is successful too; the recidivism rate among graduates was 18%, as compared with 50 or 60% in the state and nationally. "Plugging people back into housing was key, so they weren't on the street," says Finkle. Graduates got jobs too. "They weren't becoming CEOs but they were finding stability." Involvement was at first lukewarm with only six guys replying to his invitation. "I explained I'd photograph them in the program and then when released, I'd follow them into their communities maybe at work, maybe at home. My deal was, whatever I printed, I gave them a copy." Soon, Finkle was overwhelmed. "After one week, I came back with prints and then everyone in the prison wanted to be photographed, including the guards. The official I reported to said I wasn't allowed to photograph the guards. Which was perfect; I didn't want to anyway. I was saved by a policy." When Finkle shot the JOBS Project he'd often take a seat with his subjects. "Sure, I could be fly on the wall photographer, but I could also sit there and have bullshit sessions. When I was there just talking, there was no differentiation. I wasn't the photographer." Finkle has always fought the corner of the ordinary person. "Politicians are beholden to corporate interests," states Finkle who acknowledges strides made in the sixties for civil rights, women's rights, disability rights, and LGBQT rights. "Even though we have those corporations up there stringing us along with their profits, down here we made strides. Before the Occupy Movements there was impotence and despair, but now [there's activism]." 15 chain gang than it can fill.' For Houston, the story was about the women in the chain gang, but inseparably it was also about the Sheriff. "My relationship with Sheriff Joe is a little complex," say Houston. "He simply loves media attention and he never shut's up about himself. He's a malignant narcissist. Oddly enough though, I really enjoyed photographing Arpaio. There was plenty of that great southwestern light in his Arizona office. I was cordial when working with him. I got to see evil up close." Getting too close was also an issue out on the work line. "I broke some rules in the prison," admits Houston. "One day the female chain gang were on the outskirts of Phoenix and it was really hot. I drove to a store and bought a couple of crates of coke and they all got to have a short break and drink a coke. The guards didn't care and had cokes also." After a couple of days, Houston knew most of the female prisoners' names and got to learn about their crimes and their backgrounds. "For me it oscillated between being really pathetic to being really harrowing for the inmates," reflects Houston. "I have a picture of two young women. They are smiling for the camera. It looks like they're in a high school reunion. For some of them, the chain gang is a bit of a lark, but some of them they've been in much more harrowing situations in life. Some of them actually said they felt safer in Maricopa Jail than they did on the outside, particularly if they were in a bad relationship with their spouses." Continually impressed by the resolve of Group of chain gang women being marched towards the shade of trees where they will have lunch. many of the women, Houston also observed how the women seemed to cope better than the men with the cooperation needed when physically tethered to one another in a chain gang, "It's clumsy and awkward and you really have to work as a team. You have to be in sync with your fellow inmates. I noticed that the women did this really well." Houston knows he was sent to Arizona because of the extraordinary subject. He also knows it is extraordinary for a reason and that's because humiliation tactics are not the answers for criminal justice. "I think we should be looking at our society with more compassion and more intelligence. More care. Maybe the mentally ill find themselves in prison and punishment isn't the answer. We have some of the best minds, we have the resources and we just need the political will to change things." So it is as much about imagination in ourselves as citizens as it is in law enforce- ment in picking a management tactic. "To an extent, we all live in a corporate prison," suggests Houston. "The Occupy Movement is asking a lot of the correct questions. The Occupy movement is relevant to prisons; it all connects." As is the hope with all prison photography, the images should offer a bridge and connection for the viewer. Sometimes it is a connection that mirrors that between photographer and subject. Houston certainly made an impression. "When I got back to New York I had fan mail from the female chain gang in Estrella Jail. I kept my word; I said they would get pictures and they did. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship." There's no guarantee Sheriff Arpaio's office will remember him so fondly. "I wonder if they will let me in again?" says Houston. "The project doesn't seem finished yet. I don't anticipate having a difficult time leaving it behind, but I must admit I am fond of the project." cial movements and communities from which they spring - from the anti-death penalty movement to housing rights; from immigrants' rights to disability awareness; from poverty to the labour movement; anti-war protest to deaf culture. Founder of the JOBS Project, David Rudovsky, invited Finkle to photograph inmates planning for release in their job-skills and vocational classes. Finkle recognizes that prisons are connected to the success of individuals and a society in complex ways. "I recently saw Angela Davis speak. When I hear `Abolish Prisons,' I think of these huge structures being torn to the ground, 16 PPOTR was made possible through the generous donations of time, monies, food, shelter and expertise of the following people: Aaron and Bethany Aaron Rosenblum Aaron Tuller Adam Amengual Adam Shemper Aislinn Leggett Alex Nitta Alexandra Marrero Aline Smithson Alison Zavos Alvaro Rodriguez Alyse Emdur Americo Amy Elkins Andrea and Morgan Andrei Chahine Andrew Aitchison Andrew and Tiffany Elliott Andrew Lichtenstein Andy and Kristen Adams Ani Darakdjian Sarkissian Anne Stark Annette Voelckner Ara Oshagan Ashleigh Campbell Aviva Schultz-Eberlin B. Fonville Barbara J. Seely Barbara Tellman Blake Andrews Brandon Thibodeaux Brenda Ann Kenneally Brenda Fletchall Brendan Seibel Brian Connolly Elie Domit Eliza Gregory Ellen Rennard Elsa Dorfman Enji Evan Scott Kirk Frank McMains Glenna Gordon Greg Levine Greg Ruffing Gwen Lafage Harvey Finkle Heather Morton Heidi Lender Hester Keijser Hugh Hamilton Iain Jackson Irina Rozovsky Isa Leshko Jack and Marisa Jeffries Jack Klitzman Jaclyn Mika Jacques Philippe Jake Cooper Jakob Schiller Jamel Shabazz James Turnbull Jan Sturmann Jane Lindsay Jaycen McKissick Jeff Eberlin Jeff Emtman Jenn Ackerman Jenny Rikkers Jeremy Radtke Kate Osba Kathy Nedd Katrina Knutson Katy McCarthy Katy Nickles Kaylyn Messer Keith and Jeni Axline Kelly McCracken Ken and Melanie Light Ken Schles Kerensa Stoll Kevin Miyazaki Kevin Shea Adams Kim Dillon Kim Gisler Kim Morris Kimberly Olson Kristyn Ulanday Lane Nelson Lara Shipley Laurie Jo Reynolds Leah Cornwell Lee and Sue Oelke Lisa Aringer Liz Hobin Lizzie Rusbridger Lloyd Degrane Loret Steinberg Lori Waselchuk Lorraine Fay Lou Jones Luciana Santos M. G. Bernard M. Morinaga Margaret Jackson Nancy Baron Nancy McCrary Neil Robertson Nick Brown Nick Roden Nick Trenticosta Nigel Poor Nina Berman Noel Spirandelli Paris Carter Paul Eldridge Photography Paul Giguere Paul Schmelzer / Eyeteeth.org Paul Turounet Pierre Derks Rachel Herman Rachel Hulin Randy Clapp Randy Harris Rebecca Ginsburg Reem Falaknaz Richard and Cissy Ross Rob Duncan and Josh Robert Ashby Robert Gumpert Robert Hariman Robert Lyons Ryan Singel S. Katz / PhotoWings Sameer Padania Sandra Cate Sara Warshaw Scott Houston Scott Padden Sean Lil `Spacey, the official PPOTR mascot Forest scene painted on parachute canvas by US prisoner, in the bedroom of a PPOTR interviewee A cat in Massachusetts who liked to drink bath water Screenprint template in the printshop of Resurrection After Exoneration, New Orleans A photo of a photo of a clamp used to attach electrodes to the leg of men executed in the 1980s in the State of Louisiana Uncooked seitan on Justin James Reed's chopping board Guests' meal at the Ranch House, Louisiana State Penitentiary Harvey Finkle's Philadelphia studio Scott Houston holds one of his prints in his New York office PPOTR SNAPS: AN EDIT BY BLAKE ANDREWS Blake Andrews Photoblogging is curious pursuit that attracts spicy characters. Fast fingers, a strong voice, succinct phrase, a slight martyr-complex, and an eye for the image are valuable assets for any blogger. A good sense of humor helps too. Blake Andrews has the most persistent funny bone of any US photoblogger; banging it often on visual gags, overturned photo-stones and handmade surveys for dreamers. Andrews is the big-picture preacher who walks his wide-eyed acolytes to the limits of where photo exists. Andrews doesn't think photography is king, he thinks it is common. So common and so beguiling, in fact, that we might all too often overlook its treasures. He'll point you toward territories never considered. It's difficult to find a perceptive soul who'll share his/her discoveries with open humour, but in Blake, we have. And that is why we asked Blake - one of America's leading photobloggers to make an edit of Pete's PPOTR photographs. All photographs describe the world, and so these twelve from Pete's trip will say something about his journey. But in my curation that is secondary. I've selected twelve photographs because they're visual treats. They fall neatly into six pairings, two pets, two studios, two statuettes, two meals, two signs, and two photos of photos. These may appear to be simple vacation snaps, but PPOTR was no vacation for Pete. Nor was it a vacation for the several dozen photographers and bloggers across the country who found a grizzled road-weary Brit sleeping on their couch. And for the 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated (the highest per capita rate in the world), life is certainly no vacation. These prisoners are integral mebers of society. In many cases they are our physical neighbors. Yet, for most Americans they remain out of sight and out of mind. That's where photography comes into play. A photograph says This happened! In the case of American prisons This is happening! Yes, right now as you read this, millions are locked up. If you need convincing there's, no shortage of photographic evidence. PPOTR has helped to shed some light on that photographic evidence and its creators. I hope this small sampling of photographs will shed some light on PPOTR. Studio and laundry space in family basement Sign for the parking space of Warden Burl Cain outside Death Row at Louisiana State Penitentiary 17 out of sight and out of mind Brian Widdis Bruce Jackson Caitlin Judge Caleb Bryant Miller Cameron Wood Cara Finnegan Carla McLean Carlos Javier Hernandez Castro Casey Mason Cate Blouke Catherine P. Mencher Charles Magnin Cheryl Hanna-Truscott Chris and Ava-Kate Barnes Chris and Bill Ciara Leeming Clea Thouin Colin Pantall Colleen Kane Gielskie Constance Bobroff Craig Ruttle Cristelle Blackford Dallas Arts Salon Dana Mueller Darla Anderson Dave Neenhan David Bram David Campbell Deborah Luster Denise and Steve Laird Diane Christian Dickey Nesenger Dominick Reuter Doug Dertinger Dread Scott Ed Ranney Edwin Tellman Eileen Kirschner John and Jen Brook / Andrew and Sam / Richard and Nina / Sarah Glaser and Professor Craig McEwen at Bowdoin College / Eric Ritter at Grinnell College / Amy Stein at the School of Visual Arts / Dornith Doherty, Paho Mann, Irby Pace, Ben Davis, Rachel Rushing at the University of North Texas / Catherine Jacobsen, Thomas Cherian, Theresa Richey and Janet Tool at the New York Department of Corrections / staff at the Rhode Island Training School / Ann Kugler, Scott Lapham and Miguel Rosario at AS220 Providence / Sara J. Totonchi and Mary-Sidney Kelly at the Southern Center for Human Rights / Dan Macallair at the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice / David Inocencio at The Beat Within / Sacramento County District Attorney / California Highway Patrol / Peter Wagner at the Prison Policy Initiative / Warden Burl Cain, Gary Young and Cathy Fontenot at Louisiana State Penitentiary / Jacinta Gonzalez at the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice / Norris Henderson at Voices of the Ex-Offender / Dana Kaplan at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana / Zerline Hughes, Paul Ashton and Nastasia Walsh at the Justice Policy Institute / Kara Gotsch at the Sentencing Project / Isaac Ontiveros of Critical Resistance / Ruth Morgan of Community Works / Gail Brown of Life Support Alliance / Don Specter of the Prison Law Office / Clay Duda of the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange / Matt Kelley of the Innocence Project Jim Merithew Jin Zhu Joan Morgenstern Joerg Colberg and Karen Tozzi John and Bev Connolly and family John Edwin Mason John Fleming John Nuttall John Pitsakis John Tollefsen Jon Lowenstein Jonathan Kagan Jonathan Worth Joshua Freiwald Judith Tannembaum Juliana Beasley Julie Grahame Justin James Reed Justin Rohrlich Katarina Thorsen Mariella Furrer Marilyn Suriani and William A. Smith Mark Menjivar Martha Reece Martin Holden Matias Corea Matt and Robin Nuttall Matt Johnston Max and Lo Dandy Nigrosh Max Whittaker Melanie G. Snyder Melanie McWhorter Michael Hurd Michael Paris Mazzeo Michael Parker Michael Shaw Michael Subotzky Michael Wichita Michelle Reed Mona Reeder Sean Kernan Shane Rocheleau Shelly Hamill Shenid Bhayroo Sherri Caldellis Sky Tandberg Stacey Reeh Stan Banos Stella Kramer Stephen and Amber Tourlentes Steve Brennan Steve Davis Steve Liss Sumerlea Kashar Susan Noyes Platt Suzanne Revy Sye Williams Tammy David Theo Stroomer Theron Humphrey Tiffany Fairey Tim Gruber Tim Matsui Tim Shea Adams Tom Claxton Tom White Tony Dolezal Tony Fouhse Tracy Huling Travis Good Vanja Horonic Victor Blue Victoria Cheape Wasma Mansour Wayne Bremser Wayne Lowther Wendy Johnson Yasmeen Narayan 18 Benny, the one eyed pet, Albuquerque, New Mexico cruel and unusual 30y3 /Spanish photography now http://www.30y3.com/eng/ Fototazo / http://www.fototazo.com/ aCurator /a photography blog and full screen magazine http://acurator.com/ Greg Ruffing ~ Self-Guided Tour / http://gregruffing.blogspot.com/ The internet is a link-economy. In its earliest days, bloggers built for themselves a network of reciprocal links between like-minded blogs. Here we offer a paper version of that same practice. With the aid of QR codes you can discover the photobloggers who we consider are highlighting important photography and talking about it in the right ways. BagNewsNotes /only site dedicated 100% to visual politics and the analysis of news images http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/ Hamburger Eyes / http://www.hamburgereyes.com/ Blake Andrews /I blog to see what things look like blogged http://blakeandrewsphoto.com/ HEREONTHEWEB / http://hereontheweb.co.uk/ Colin Pantall /a blog on photography and other subjects from Bath in England http://colinpantall.blogspot.com/ It's Never Summer / so, let's look at photographs! http://bremser.tumblr.com/ Conscientious / http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/ LPV Magazine / http://lpvmagazine.com/ David Campbell / http://www.david-campbell.org/ LensCulture / http://www.lensculture.com/ Daylight Magazine / exploring the space between documentary photographs and the more conceptual concerns of fine-art photography http://www.daylightmagazine.org/ On Shadow /photography in all its many forms http://www.onshadow.com/ Dodge & Burn /diversity in photography http://dodgeburn.blogspot.com/ Re: PHOTO /thoughts on photography, photographers & my London diary by Peter Marshall http://re-photo.co.uk/ Duckrabbit /sparks may fly http://duckrabbit.info/ Reciprocity Failure /a blog about: photography, life and the accasional UFO... http://reciprocity-failure.blogspot.com/ DVAFOTO / http://www.dvafoto.com/ Slightly Lucid / http://www.slightlylucid.com/ Elizabeth Avedon /photographs, books, art, vintage, contemporary http://elizabethavedon.blogspot.com/ LENSCRATCH / founded and edited by Aline Smithson http://www.lenscratch.com/ eyecurious / http://www.eyecurious.com/ THIS IS THE WHAT / http://www.thisisthewhat.com/ String Theater Yana Payusova Feature Shoot / http://www.featureshoot.com/ trendbeheer / about art and visual culture http://trendbeheer.com/ Flak Photo / partnering with artists to promote their work online produced by Andy Adams http://flakphoto.com/ URBANAUTICA / http://www.urbanautica.com/ Food For Your Eyes / platform for photography http://foodforyoureyes.tumblr.com/ We Can Shoot Too / http://wecanshoottoo.blogspot.com/ Russian Prison Series (2003-2005) was inspired by Payusova's experience of studying and listening to personal stories of incarcerated teenagers (14-21 year-old boys) at Lebedeva and Kolpino prisons in St. Petersburg. Many of them became the victims of the economic chaos that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. The work explores concepts of saintliness, sins, holiness, and martyrdom by drawing on symbolic elements of Russian Christian Orthodox culture. For this purpose, she constructed a visual language where the traditional black and white photographic imagery is mixed with the painted iconographic and symbolic elements of Russian Christian Orthodox culture. By merging and mixing these referents, her intention is to call into question how we define and judge saints and sinners and what factors contribute to the creation of both. "As the project evolved, I began to see the prison community as mirroring and mimicking the organization of general Russian society. Further along, I also began noticing similarities between prison and church cultures. Both are structured by rigid hierarchies and employ secret languages known only to a privileged few. Russian Orthodox Church uses an old form of Slavic Russian in its services and writings. The prisoners also use a secret language, one that has been passed verbally. Similar to the American hip-hop vernacular, Russia's `blatnaya fenya' has infiltrated the popular culture; it is considered `cool' to speak the lingo of the inmates from the zone." Both church and prison cultures use complicated visual language, codified through use of certain symbols and the positioning on the pictorial plane. Orthodox iconography was not intended to be confusing or elitist; rather, the visual language had lost its original clarity and simplicity as the centuries passed. Prisoners invented their own visual language through tattooing the body. In this case, the pictorial plane becomes the body. Visually entangling the histories and parallels of church and prison cultures, Payusova wishes to challenge the branding of present-day sinners. cruel and unusual cruel and unusual To understand Jane Lindsay's Gems, you must first understand Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County, Phoenix, Arizona. A man who loves to court the media and dictate the message, Sheriff Arpaio is America's most controversial lawman. His no-nonsense approach to law-enforcement makes full use of public spectacle and humiliation. One of Sheriff Arpaio's most well known stunts is Tent City. Here he dresses inmates in pink underwear and takes pride in the fact he feeds each prisoner for 20 cents per day. He is a vocal proponent for chain gangs; his the first county in America to establish an all-female version. Not only are prisoners visible on public roads in striped uniforms, Arpaio makes them visible on a website by parading every person picked up by a deputy and booked into the county jail. According to the Maricopa County Sheriff Office, the mugshot section of the website gets over one million page views per day. Members of the public vote on a "winner", who then gets frontpage status as the announced "Mug Shot of the Day." Lindsay's Gems are made using screen grabs from the Mugshot of the Day website (http://www.mcso.org/mugshot/) She transfers them onto transparencies from which she makes a tiny tintype of each portrait. Within the hollow of a bottle cap she inserts a tintype and seals it with resin. "A gem was small tintype image, around an inch in size, used in the 19th century," says Lindsay. "Historically the gem was less expensive making it more available to the public. They were manufactured for the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. Gems were made using a camera with special lenses to create a plate with several images. As precious objects, Gems were often put into broaches or hairpins. They can be handheld devotional objects." "The Gems in my work are, in many ways, a record of individuals who find themselves in the hands of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department. Each gem recognizes the basic human rights of the individual depicted, regardless of who they are and the severity of their alleged crime. They are a representation of the three hundred people arrested every day in Maricopa County." To date, Lindsay has made over 6,000 Gems. One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana Deborah Luster courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery " In 1998 photographer Deborah Luster and poet C.D. Wright set out to produce a record of Louisiana's prison population through image and text. One Big Self is a document to ward off forgetting, an opportunity for those inmates to present themselves as they would be seen, bringing what they own or borrow or use: work tools, objects of their making, messages of their choosing, their bodies, themselves. The photographer has been commissioned, in a sense, by the inmates to make portraits for their loved ones--trying to ensure a balance between photograph and subject, to connect the viewer, whether mother, child, friend, or stranger, to the prisoner. The view is inherently personal." gems Jane Lindsay 2011 � ongoing SERIES: Gems Christiane Feser's study of prisons set within ordinary residential German environments is meant to surprise us. In a moment of surprise might we ask ourselves if there are other things about prisons that may surprise us; things that we may re-evaluate? Photographers will often evacuate a composition of human figures as a tactic to introduce the surreal. Feser charges her spaces with the nascent promise of activity. Swings are there to be swung, slides are there to be slid down. The time suspended here outside the walls eerily reflects that of the time suspended on the inside. The fact that several of Feser's photographs include details of schools and playgrounds is a challenge to the idea that prisoners are different to us. Before they were adults they were children; as well as prisoners they may be parents. Hospitals, libraries, schools, offices or prisons; we all skirt with institutions and submit to their order as we pass through life. Untitled Christiane Feser SERIES: Prisons, 2009 "Prisons shows the proximity of various German prisons to their host communities. Primarily, these are older prisons that are situated in the midst of suburban neighborhoods. Towers, surrounded by barbed wire, electric fences and video cameras, guard these prison walls and yet they border public parks, private gardens, schoolyards and playgrounds. Unlike newer prisons that are usually built beyond city limits and with which there is almost no contact during everyday life, the institutions shown here present themselves as integral components in the urban view and of urban life. Prisons are never purely functional buildings; they also symbolize always a subtle threat. This threat exists on several levels. First of all, there is the omnipresent fear that those incarcerated beyond the walls could break out and become a danger. These fears lead regularly to protests of residents, whenever a new prison is planned. Second, the view of a prison is also troubling. A prison - unlike, say, a refugee center - always represents a warning, and perhaps even a dark promise. If you do not observe the law, you will find yourself on the other side of the wall. Among most members of the public, there are only vague ideas of what exactly happens behind the wall. Ideas are strongly influenced by cinema, television and newsreel. Although prisons are institutions of the democratic state, they always inhabit "blind spots" beyond the observation of the majority of citizens � even when located rights in their midst." " I was learning from these men about what it means to be a human being even when your entire environment, your entire world, says you are just a number. So these guys are classified as numbers, not as people, but these numbers were able to show me what it means to be a human being. And I felt like by touring this work, they might show others what's possible in all of us. The people that we have dismissed can also be contributing to our conversation, to our ideas of who we can be, and to our aspirations of who and what we can be to each other." Lori Waselchuk (Interview, Press Street, Oct. 2011) Prison Guard Watches From The Levee Lori Waselchuk 2007 SERIES: Grace before Dying A life sentence in Louisiana means life. More than 90% of the 5,300 inmates imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola will die behind bars. Until the hospice program was created in 1998, prisoners died mostly alone in the prison hospital. Their bodies were buried in shoddy boxes in numbered graves at the prison cemetery. But the nationally recognized program, run by one staff nurse and a team of inmate volunteers, has changed that. Now, when a terminally ill inmate is too sick to live among the general prison population, he is transferred to the hospice ward. Here, inmate volunteers work closely with hospital and security staff to care for the patient. The volunteers, most of whom are serving life sentences themselves, go to great lengths to ensure that their fellow inmate does not die alone. Prison officials say that the program has helped to transform one of the most violent prisons in the South into one of the least violent maximum- security institutions in the United States. The hospice volunteers must go through a difficult process to bury their own regrets and fears, and unearth their capacity to love. Grace Before Dying looks at how, through hospice, inmates assert and affirm their humanity in an environment designed to isolate and punish. cruel and unusual " In the centre of the vast African continent, there is a constellation of misery. Fetid, isolated, and and often illegal, Burundi's single-cell "cachot" prisons are off the radar of even many of the country's human rights organisations. Children as young as ten crouch in the reeking dark of these dungeons, sometimes for years, often with no evidence against them, and rarely having seen the inside of a court room. The Burundian constitution states fourteen days as the maximum imprisonment; the reality is a violent miscarriage of any sense of justice. For many prisoners, the only crime they have encountered is that of their imprisonment, and torture at the hands of the police. Arrested for infractions as myriad as sorcery and murder � or in the case of 10 year old Eli-Davide in Cibitoke, for just watching a stranger stealing DVDs � the unlucky pass from the violent hands of the police to the abuses of life under prisoner chiefs: "If someone new can't pay the cachot tax, he can spend a week without sitting down, without eating � he must live in the corner where we shit in the night." Without documentation or representation, these losers of the seemingly random justice game are truly lost." 2009 SERIES: The Dungeon OPG (Officier de la Police General), general police officer, responsible for the detention cell in Buhinjuza, near the city Muyinga. Laura Gabriele Dix, Burundi 2009 Single cell Nico Bick Single cell Nico Bick Nathalie Mohadjer Six white towers, a deep moat and a huge wall; the exterior of the most well-known prison in the Netherlands. For his book P.I., Nico Bick has photographed the internal spaces of the Over-Amstel Penitentiary Institution, a prison known to locals as the Bijlmerbajes. Concrete Uniformity of the Bijlmerbajes Arno Haijtema "It is warm, clammy, and stuffy," says Amsterdam-based photographer Nico Bick, "Suffocating and oppressive. There are doors everywhere, you feel locked in. After a day of photographing, I was glad to be outside again." Bick found no great pleasure working inside the Bijlmerbajes. However, his years of working on the project have been worth the effort, because his book P now makes .I. this infamous prison visible to public for the first time. It is quite unusual that a building complex, the exterior of which is known so well to most Dutch, has never before been the subject of a photo documentary. Since its construction in 1978, thousands of suspects and convicts have spent months, and sometimes even years there. For that reason, the Bijlmerbajes is full of history. The complex faces destruction in the near future, which is why it's a good thing Nico Bick managed to capture and preserve the Bijlmerbajes for history's sake. Once thought of as humane, the now out-of-date prison occupies expensive real estate for which the city of Amsterdam has other plans. Bick is attracted to places he calls `semi-public': "I think it is interesting to look at places most people are familiar with, but which they never enter because they exude an air of privacy." Previously, he has recorded places such as archives; petrol stations; sheds of the homeless on city limits haphazardly thrown together from cast-off wood, cardboard and plastic; and anonymous, abandoned con- Back on the Block - Andy & Tata part 1 Brenda Ann Kenneally Andy eats cereal on the first day of school. While other kids his age are in class, his mother lies in bed, ill from a mixture of crack cocaine and methadone that she is getting to kick her heroine use. She needs to get up and get to the methadone clinic or she won't be allowed to get her dose for the day. Andy was the tousle-headed street kid who could jump over five people with his bike, turn an abandoned building into a shelter for a dozen wild dogs, and stand toe-to-toe with any of the savvy young drug hustlers that worked the doorway of the corner store with his mother. VIDEO Back on the Block - Andy & Tata part 5 Brenda Ann Kenneally `A Gap Life,' the short film about Andy as he comes to terms with young adulthood, is a testimony to the long-term effects of public policy on Andy and generations of young people who will come of age as America perpetuates segregation through our criminal justice system. At 23, Andy himself is the father of a three year old. Andys' daughter was born while his own mother, Tata, was in prison and after the five-year anniversary of his father's death. Andy's childhood, fraught with intervention from the child welfare agencies and the criminal justice system has been the foundation for his wish to "do better for his own daughter." crete watchtowers, the silent relics of the Cold War. And now, the Bijlmerbajes, with an emphasis on documenting the building's cells where the prisoners spend the majority of their time, every single day. You see no human beings in these photos, made by Bick between 2006 and 2009. "There is a very practical reason for this," says Bick. "The prison authorities did not allow me to depict either inmates or personnel. That was not a problem for me, because I never photograph people. In my work, I study spaces and how they are used. In that sense, I suppose that my work is about people � they just never appear in my photos." Always accompanied by a guard, Bick roamed the halls and approached detainees about the project. "About half of those I talked to, found it acceptable to have their cell photographed," explains Bick, "The others either saw no merit in the project or attempted to make a deal with me first. Although they tried to negotiate, I was not allowed to give them anything, not even a photograph, so I had nothing to offer them." Eventually, Bick photographed 24 cells. "That number was not a coincidence. A pavilion, spread over two floors, also contains 24 cells. I find it meaningful that in this respect, the book reflects the actual building. I approached my work almost mathematically, because I wanted the uniformity of the complex to become apparent. Later I found out that the windows in each cell are not in the identical location. I also discovered that a few cells had another floor colour. Despite these differences, the underlying structure still compelled me to work with a certain repetitious rigor." And thus we are shown the sad, small rooms, each with a single bed and a triangular wall table, almost always adorned with a television set, coffee maker, and a common dish towel by way of tablecloth. A few books and trinkets on the shelf above the bed. A poster or picture postcards on the walls. A clothes rack, which is either used or not. "Because the photos rely on the details, I used a tripod and view camera," Bick explains. "For example, you can determine the length of time that someone has stayed in a cell from the extent to which it has been decorated." Bick's photos do not reveal how he himself feels about society's treatment of imprisoned criminals. "I am not a photojournalist. I document in order for individuals to judge for themselves what the conditions are, and then form their own opinions." Nonetheless Bick became aware that some people changed their opinions after looking at the photos. "When shown the first photo, they commented: that's not so bad, such a cell. However, after seeing more of the same images, they became much less positive. Everyone agreed; once you have seen these photos, you can never look at the Bijlmerbajes in the same light." Besides the individual cells, which are all photographed in portrait format, Bick also recorded the isolation cells, visiting rooms, yards, the main entrances and the control rooms filled with monitor screens. These all were captured in landscape format, except the single tower control room, which is a vertical image. Bick explains, "In some way that is appropriate. Just like the detainees in their cells, the guards are also imprisoned there." Arno Haijtema, De Volkskrant, 13 December 2011 P.i. Published by Nico Bick, Amsterdam 2011 With a text by Frits Gierstberg ISBN 9789081428217 P is available at the Noorderlicht Gallery .I. and can be ordered via http://www.nicobick.nl http://link_same_as qrcode.com/interview