‘Jails Sud America’, by Valerio Bispuri

Hi,

You need to include Tom Roma’s In Prison Air

http://www.thomasroma.com/books/in_prison_air/

Its an amazing book and I don’t think your blog is complete without it.

Best,

Lakshmi Gopal

Hi Pete:

Sorry for the delayed response. I disagree. Roma is an extremely sensitive photographer and in order to understand his work we have to understand his deep sensitivity to the human condition. His subject matter is never direct. His work, as far as I have understood it is about the quiet emotional responses that get overshadowed by visual form. Yes, the obvious thing to do when photographing prisons would be to photograph prisoners. Many people have done this. Many people still do this and I find such pictures less interesting, unless of course they are taken by the inmates themselves. In all other cases you are just putting the vulnerability of vulnerable people on display and, at the least, you better make sure you do this well. Many such series are taken by the grand narrative of captivity and they don’t reflect the anguish. I feel that sometimes even the presence of an individual diminishes the anguish and the helplessness of prison. When we look into a prison cell, we see prisoners. But the prisoners themselves see Roma’s walls and their anguish is peeling on them like the paint in his photographs. I have such admiration for the details and the method. Both speak to Roma’s capacity to not just to show a condition, but describe an experience. The scratch marks, the notes, the decay, the evidence of time, the evidence of solitude, the evidence of cruelty. Ultimately an empty cell is the worst punishment society can offer an individual aside from death. Roma’s images capture this experience with a visually haunting quality and with an aesthetic elegance to boot.

I have only a small anecdote to share and I hope this will convince you: my father has been a vegetarian for most of my life and passionately against animal cruelty. We used to ask him to take us to the zoo as young children and he would oblige. Most parents obviously would show their children the monkeys, elephants and pandas. My father showed my the scratch marks on the door to the pandas cage. That image stays in my mind more strongly than any other and in it I understood what a zoo meant, not for the visitors but for the residents.