Photo by Jack Jeffries.

WHO

I am not a photographer.

I stick to looking and commenting.

I work as a freelance writer.

WHERE

I live in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Lancashire, England.

WHY PRISONS?

I believe the United States needs to pursue large-scale prison and sentencing reform.

We must stop warehousing people and be creative with rehabilitation. Prisons in the US are socially and economically unsustainable. As they exist, prisons are a liability. Often discussions on prison issues are framed incorrectly. Sometimes prisons are ignored. Problems also exist in other countries.

WHY PHOTOGRAPHY?

Cameras and their operators function in recording, and to some degree, interpreting the stories of (and within) prison systems. How varied is the imagery?

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/were the motives? What are the responses? What social and political powers are at play in a photograph’s manufacture? And, how is knowledge, related to those powers, constructed?

Prison Photography also concerns itself with civil liberties, ethics and social justice as they relate to photography and photojournalism.

I have spoken about Prison Photography in more detail in interviews with the following folk:

WRITING

DAY JOB: Raw File photography blog, Wired.com (August 2009 – present). Article archive.

CONTRIBUTOR: BagNewsNotes, the only website dedicated solely to visual politics and the analysis of news images: (May 2010 – present). My article archive. Participant in The Fall of Bin Laden, a BagNews Salon about the images of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination. (June 2011)

VOLUNTEER: University Beyond Bars. Art teacher and board-member with a prison higher education program at Washington State Reformatory, Monroe, WA. (May 2009 – September 2011.)

ESSAYS:

Foreword for Confined exhibition catalogue, Bluecoats Gallery, Liverpool, UK, 2011.

Foreword for Life’s A Blast, by Linda Forsell (Premiss; 1st edition, 2012)

REPORTING

Prison Photography on the Road, Autumn 2011

Between September 24th and December 20th, 2011, I made a 12-week journalism road-trip across America. I interviewed over three dozen photographers who have documented prisons. In addition, I spoke to two dozen leading practitioners in prison arts, prison education, prison law and activism.

Prison Photography on the Road audio interviews are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and will be published on a dedicated website (upcoming) for free use.

Audio interviews will also be published in the digital edition of the Prison Photography photobook (Autumn 2013).

Prison Photography on the Road was made possible with the support of 182 backers who supported my Kickstarter campaign, Prison Photography on the Road: Stories Behind the Pictures.

CURATING

Cruel and Unusual, Noorderlicht Photogallery, Groningen, The Netherlands (Feb 18th-Apr 8th, 2012); Melkweg Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (May, 2012); Photoville, New York, USA (June 22nd-July 1st, 2012).

Women in [Prison] Photography, for the Women in Photography website. (Feb 2012).

Non Sufficient Funds, Vermillion Gallery, Seattle (Apr 2010) A show of prison artwork made by a dozen students from Monroe Correctional Complex, nr. Seattle, WA. Details here, here and here.

Forthcoming: An exhibition of prison non-traditional imagery – surveillance, code, vernacular, workshop photography. Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA. (Jan 2014 – Mar 2014).

SPEAKING

I have delivered lectures at Nottingham Trent University and Coventry University in the UK. In the US, I’ve presented at Evergreen State College, WA; Bowdoin College, ME; Grinnell College, IO; University of North Texas, TX; and the School of Visual Arts, NY.

I am a contributor to the free, online undergraduate photography courses Photography and Narrative (#PHONAR) and Picturing the Body (#PICBOD) at Coventry University, UK.

I’ve been a panelist/moderator for a number of OPEN-i webinars including, Edmund Clark on Guantanamo and Photographic Coverage of the Haiti Earthquake.

SOME VIDEO

While I was on the road in 2011, Tim Matsui followed me for a week and made Prison Photography On The Road, a 7-minute short about my work, including a workshop delivered at Sing Sing Prison, NY.

SOME AUDIO

In The Other One Percent, Jeff Emtman and I talk about prisons and my work for his podcast about fear and the unknown, Here Be Monsters.

AWARDS

10 of the Best Photoblogs by the British Journal of Photography. (July, 2011)

Top 20 Best Photo Blogs by LIFE.com. (May 2011)

“This is heavy, thoughtful stuff — it’s impossible to spend time here without feeling your assumptions about all sorts of issues beginning to wobble — and Prison Photography presents it all with grace, power, and a wry, welcome humor.”