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“[Gaga] swore and postured during the CES press conference in a way that would have angered [Polaroid cofounder] Edwin Land immensely.”
“Out of three products revealed by Polaroid from the Lady Gaga Grey Label collection, only one was in its working state. Bobby Sager, the new head of Polaroid, stood beside her dressed in a curious outfit with sneakers on his feet and a cardigan tied around his shoulders. It’s a curious outfit because in reality Sager is a Boston bruiser with a hard-nosed business sense. He ain’t no Lady Gaga loving dilettante whatever image he wanted to pedal in Vegas.”
“The New Polaroid is like New Coke – a terrible idea. It now pumps out crappy television, awful digital photo frames and instant cameras that look like they were designed by some state-owned skunk work in a former Soviet State. Lady Gaga could not care less about Polaroid or its heritage.”
– from, Look away while Lady Gaga molests the corpse of Polaroid
PREVIOUSLY ON PRISON PHOTOGRAPHY
Check out Lady Gaga is Not an Offender, She’s Just Offensive
Jackie Dewe Mathews‘ series Trafficantes, is time spent with women imprisoned for drug smuggling in Brazils’ Sao Paolo Capital Penitentiary for Women. Pretty much without exception, each woman made bad choices, but those were bad choices born of tough lives, low self-esteem and sometimes addiction.
The women come from all over the globe. Dewe Mathews opens the essay with this caption: “Sao Paulo Capital Penitentiary for Women, where women from over 30 countries are held. The largest numbers come from South Africa, then South America, followed by former Portuguese colonies in Africa such as Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique, as well as Europe, especially, Spain and Portugal and Asia, particularly Thailand and the Philippines.”
Throughout, Dewe Mathews makes efficient use of text-captioning to tell these womens circumstances. Some of the portraits are first class; by first class I mean laden with emotion and character. Other photos can be flat, but the series as a whole is a illuminating look at a hidden world.
Mathews appeared on Verve today, providing the following bio:
Jackie Dewe Mathews (b.1978, England) worked in the film industry as a freelance camera assistant on feature films and commercials. Her continued interest in cinematography has informed her photography practice which she was able to develop during an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2007. In 2008 she was awarded the Joan Wakelin bursary for a social documentary project from the Guardian newspaper and the Royal Photographic Society. In 2009 she was selected by the Magenta Foundation for emerging photographers. In 2010 she was a runner up in the Ojodepez and Julia Margret Cameron awards.
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Thanks to Bob Gumpert for the tip.
Dewe Mathews’ work should be compared with Chan Chao‘s intimate portraiture.
It was with great sadness I heard about Pete Postlethwaite‘s death. He’s a Lancashire lad like myself. He and my dad attended the same teacher training college in London during the sixties. Postlethwaite’s performance in In the Name of the Father knocked me off my seat, making a huge impression on my teenage mind; on what justice was and what injustice could be masked to be.
And, until today, I did not know he was ever an advocate for prison reform.
R.I.P. Pete.
Above clip found at the Prison Reform Trust’s Youtube channel.
The Prison Reform Trust (UK) has also just launched a new website – http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/. As a side note, the new website includes the work of Edmund Clark.
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The Shpilman Institute for Photography (The SIP) invites scholars and independent researchers from all over the world to submit their applications for research on photography and on philosophy and photography.
All details on guidelines, themes, the application process can be found on The SIP website.
Grants are based on proposals for research leading to the completion within the grant period of a written document, whether an essay or extended research paper. All submissions and papers for both the calls must be in English. Grants for individuals and group research will range from US $5,000 up to $15,000. Deadline for submissions is March 1, 2011.
www.thesip.org/open_calls/general_call_poster.pdf
www.thesip.org/open_calls/philosophy_call_poster.pdf
Fancy a dabble?
Okay, I know it’s premature, but it is also easy to laud writing and exposé such as this in the Guardian:
In short, US forces failed to secure Qa’qaa, Iraq’s largest and deadliest munitions complex. The IAEA warned them of its extreme hazard prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Looted explosives were used for attacks against US and coalition troops. The Bush administration covered all this up in the two weeks before the 2004 election, Al-Qaida took control of the site and promptly murdered hundreds if not thousands of local Iraqis.
Excerpts:
In 1991, following the Iraqi rout in Kuwait, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) gained access to Qa’qaa, where they found 145 tonnes of pure RDX and PETN … [and] hundreds of drums of an off-white, crystalline powder. About as highly explosive as high explosive gets, High Melt Explosive (HMX) is used to detonate nuclear warheads. Qa’qaa had nearly 200 tonnes of it. The IAEA moved all the explosives to secure bunkers on the south-west corner of the facility, then closed the doors with tamper-proof seals. And there the 341 tonnes sat for more than a decade.
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Two weeks after the start of the war, Jacques Baute, the head of the Iraq nuclear inspection teams, visited the US mission to advise, again, that the weapons sites needed protection. He specifically mentioned Qa’qaa. Just days before the invasion, he told officials, inspectors had inventoried the facility’s HMX, RDX and PETN stores and ensured that the seals were still intact. This kind of materiel, the Frenchman suggested, should be kept out of the hands of looters. There was no reaction.
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By 8 May 2003, when the Pentagon’s Exploratory Task Force arrived at Qa’qaa to search for WMDs, all of the PETN, RDX and HMX was gone.
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In 2004, al-Qaida established a camp inside the Qa’qaa complex itself. “We had a firing range, like a tunnel. It was used to shoot small-calibre bullets,” says Ali. “It became a training camp for terrorists.”
Anyone entering the facility without permission was killed. Al-Qaida spread horror stories about its activities, intimidating locals into collaborating. An execution room was set up with a makeshift gallows. Yusuf was part of the operation. “We used to kill people in terrible ways, torturing them to give al-Qaida more influence.” Mutilations, murders and decapitations were filmed and copies were distributed around [the local area] Yusifiyah to discourage dissent.
Read the full piece here.
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This catastrophic turn of events began in the first hours of the invasion of Iraq and conituned as the West gawked and applauded the staged toppling of Saddam’s statue.
Rina and Ali, the boombastic team at KALW Informant, alerted me to a set of portraits from 1920’s Australia of individuals categorised as criminals.
These are portraits, not mugshots. Luminous, cathartic, full of weight. They’re the pre-August Sander, pre-Richard Avedon, pre-Irving Penn masterpieces of an anonymous police photographer.
PREVIOUSLY ON PRISON PHOTOGRAPHY
The collection is very similar to a set of mugshots from the archives of the Louisiana Division/City Archives in New Orleans.
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All images from the Historic Houses Trust website and the New South Wales Police Archives, Sydney.
This time last year Laura Sullivan for NPR reported on the US broken Bail Bond System. I celebrated her work and later, upon it’s resurfacing called Sullivan “An American Hero”
NPR contacted me recently to let me know Sullivan’s series won an Excellence in Broadcast Journalism Award.
Bravo!
From NPR:
NPR News is being honored with a 2010 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton Award for excellence in broadcast journalism for a three-part investigative series revealing deep and costly flaws in the U.S. justice system’s bail bond process, it was announced today. Reported by NPR Correspondent Laura Sullivan and edited by Senior National Editor Steven Drummond, “Bonding for Profit” exposed deep inequities in the treatment of rich and poor defendants, how the bail industry is vested in maintaining those inequities and the surprising cost to taxpayers. The series aired on the NPR newsmagazines All Things Considered and Morning Edition, and is available online at npr.org: www.npr.org/series/122954677/behind-the-bail-bond-system
After months-long research into the perpetual and expensive overcrowding problem in U.S. prisons, Sullivan discovered that the bond system may be a major factor in keeping jails stuffed. “Bonding for Profit” focused on the dilemma of more than a half million petty, nonviolent offenders stuck in jail for months due to the simple reason of not being able to make bail – which is sometimes as little as $50 – at a $9 billion a year cost to taxpayers. In three reports, Sullivan revealed how stark options often force inmates to take prosecutor deals in exchange for early release, and how the bondsman lobby fights pretrial release programs proven to save millions of dollars.
The “Bonding For Profit” series produced emotional feedback from listeners, and has been cited by The Justice Department, the American Bar Association and lawmakers in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in initiatives to examine current bail practices. The Awards Jury also praised Sullivan’s writing, saying it “crackles with insight and storytelling based on hard facts.”
The duPont-Columbia Awards will be presented at a ceremony on January 20 at Columbia University in New York. Accepting the awards on behalf of the organization are Laura Sullivan and Steve Drummond. Information about all of the winners announced this year is available at: www.dupont.org
The Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards honoring overall excellence in broadcast journalism were established in 1942 by Jessie Ball duPont in memory of her late husband. Administered since 1968 by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the awards are considered the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, which the Journalism School also administers.
Governing Through Crime recently noted that photographs more than legalese may have swayed the opinion of Justice Breyer during December’s SCOTUS discussion of Schwarzenegger vs. Plata.
VIEW ALL PHOTOGRAPHS SUBMITTED HERE.
Breyer saw the photos in an amicus brief submitted by a coalition of religious group (PDF) in support of the plaintiff:
“It’s a big record. What I did was I – it refers to on-line evidence – I went and looked at the pictures, and the pictures are pretty horrendous to me. And I would say Page 10 of the religious group’s brief (PDF), for example, shows you one of them. And what [the religious groups] are saying is obvious. Just look at it. In conditions such as these, you cannot have mental health facilities that will stop people from killing themselves, and you cannot have medical facilities that will stop staph and tubercular infection.”
Schwarzenegger v. Plata is a federal class-action suit challenging health care conditions in the California prisons. In 2009, a California-based three-judge federal court found that massive overcrowding in the state’s prisons contributed to untreated mental illness, suicides and other preventable deaths of inmates. The overcrowding, the judges ruled, violated the Eighth Amendment rights of prisoners to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.
The three judge panel ordered the release of 35,000 – 45,000 prisoners to ease overcrowding and restore constitutional rights. Schwarzenegger and the CDCr authroities immediately appealed. SCOTUS are currently deciding if the three judge panel was within jurisdiction to order the mass release of prisoners; AND if overcrowding does directly cause poor medical and mental health-care.
Commentators have noted the apparent empathy of many Justices. It is common knowledge that California’s prison policy has been tumorous and it is no surprise it has come to the most drastic court ordered release of prisoners in US history to solve the problem. The Atlanta Post reports California Sheds Light On The Need for Criminal Justice Reform.
Prison Photography 