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Prison Workers © Ricky Maynard
Ricky Maynard‘s No More Than What You See is an old project, but tackles a subject I’ve not featured before.
Following the report Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991), self-taught photographer Maynard was compelled to look at the prisons of South Australia, including Cadell Training Centre, the Yatala Labour Prison, and the Northfield Prison Complex.
Maynard (born 1953 Launceston, Tasmania, Australia) explains in his 1993 grant winning Fifty Crows portfolio:
If you are Aboriginal in Australia you are 15 times more likely than a non-Aboriginal to spend time in jail. I felt that it was important for a Koorie (Aboriginal) photographer to record some aspects of what was happening to our people at this time. After all, the Australian Government spent millions of dollars and produced hundreds of pages of reports, but little that Aboriginal people could relate to. It seemed to me that a few strong images had the potential to convey more than all those words. We needed something that people could relate to, visual proof of the times and the experiences, for both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people.
All captions are direct quotes from the National Gallery of Australia’s own captions. See 42 images from Maynard’s archive. See Maynard’s more recent work at Stills Gallery.
There are things in this picture you cannot see. “I enter here only with a pair of jocks. The walls are made of rubber and the blankets are made of canvas.” © Ricky Maynard
“When I fainted in the streets the cops just threw me into the back of the van head first. Now they bring me here and it’s so cold.” © Ricky Maynard
“There are no mirrors, all the ones we have here are steel so that you never can see yourself, you’re always distorted.” © Ricky Maynard
“I’ve let my frustrations go, and I wonder about the others, will they let their frustrations out here or release them on the community? I often wonder, with the experience I have of frequently visiting this place, how different I will be when I get released from prison.” © Ricky Maynard
Angola prison rodeo © Sarah Stolfa
Philadelphia based photographer Sarah Stolfa, best known for The Regulars, a portrait series of punters at the bar she tended, has posted some new work on her website.
Pallbearers struggling with a casket, an elegantly dressed African-American lady with a gun holster, a man with a singed blanket stood in a charred field, a long-limbed man with leather bible, public urination, public housing; this is a visually uneasy but coherent edit and presumably the result of a road trip.
Also included are two photographs from the prison rodeo at Louisiana State Penitentiary (one and two). I am uncovering more and more photo projects from this particular event and I’m still working out what, if anything, this relatively high level of exposure means within the specialist sub-sub-genre of prison photography.
Lorenzo Meloni‘s series Amal begins by quoting a 21 year-old Palestinian, “In my short life, I’ve seen nothing that makes me hope for peace; I’ve only seen destruction, death, pain. In my life, I’ve only seen the sea once.”
Amal contains a variety of styles and weaves the viewer through multiple emotions in a short space of time. It’s confusing … in a good way. That depth fits with the complex politics of the region.
Prison Photography 