Fourteen female prisoners at Tirgsor Prison in Romania participated in a six-camera workshop led by Cosmin Bumbuţ.
The workshop was suggested by a Miss Raducanu (presumably the warden), and Cosmin Bumbuţ took up the initiative. Bumbuţ gained sponsorship from f64 and insisted that – after basic training – the women be left unsupervised with the cameras for the duration of the project.
Bumbut: “I received six Canon PowerShot cameras that I took with me to Tirgsor in July. The cameras worried me, they had so many buttons and the manual was so complex that I was skeptical that anyone could use them; I, for one, wasn’t able to. I felt very nervous.”
Over a two month period the group captured 14,000 images. 395 were chosen for the final exhibition and 95 can be seen in an online gallery at Punctum (Romanian language). Here is a Google translation.
I’ve picked out 12 images.
This is a marvelous project. I would like to see more photography used as rehabilitation in prisons. I have a colleague who uses video in an ethnological framework and the men really benefit from the novel educational approach.
This Romanian project is similar to the pinhole photography of the girls of Remann Hall here in Washington State.
Finally, it is worth saying that Bumbut was inspired by Klavdij Sluban‘s prison workshops which he has conducted across the globe.
Found via Gawker.
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August 17, 2011 at 12:28 am
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[...] Prison Rodeo – Former Prisoner, Diana Ortiz, Inspires Confidence and Healing in Female Inmates – Photography Workshop for Romanian Women Prisoners Produces 14,000 Images – Women’s Prisons in Afghanistan – Women Behind Bars: Jane Evelyn Atwood’s ‘Too Much Time’ [...]
June 7, 2012 at 2:17 pm
In a Romanian Womens Prison, Ioana Cirlig Asks, “What Do You Miss?” « Prison Photography
[...] When I learnt of Ioana Cirlig‘s work in Romania, the name Târgşor Prison rang a bell. Indeed, Târgşor (alternative spelling, Tirgsor) was the site of photographer Cosmin Bumbuţ’s six camera workshop I wrote about two years ago. [...]