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Tumbling competition, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library
Earlier this morning I pointed out the riches of the Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, in the Marin County Free Library Archives. The San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet 1930 Album deserves it own post.
Any sack race that has contestants cocooned up to their necks is a serious affair (image 2). Any tumble would hurt.
The tug-of-war (image 3) is fought on a remarkably complex purpose-built platform. It unfortunately looks like a rack.
I have no idea what narrative the parade (image 4) carries, but African American inmates donning hessian sacks painted to mimic “primitive” costume and carrying a whiter-than-whiter mustachioed swan-king is particularly discomforting.
Pole vault without a 60 inch crash-mat beneath the bar?
Lots to be said about cross-dressing and gender-bending in prisons, but not to be superimposed upon these 80 year old photographs. Two fascinating images.
And we just had Halloween. Who knew pie-eating contests (last image) produced zombies?
Sack race, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Tug-of-war competition with officials looking on, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library
Prisoners in costume parading at the San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
"Fifty-yard crawl" race, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
High-jump competition, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Pole vault competition, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Long-jump competition, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Clown performance featuring a duck, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Stage entertainment with four male dancers in female dress, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Pie-eating contest showing three participants, San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library.
Pie-eating contest (close-up of one participant), San Quentin Little Olympics Field Meet, 1930. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room Collection, Marin County Free Library
The caption to this photo reads, ‘A woman prisoner at San Quentin in her room. The decorations are all made from fancy paper and spoons.’ Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library.
This image from the San Quentin Photography Album from the Marin County Free Library really struck me. Dedicated decoration. The San Quentin Photography Album was compiled by Richard M. Smith & Genevieve Smith.
The Anne T. Kent California Reading Room, Marin County Free Library Archives are great. Don’t miss:
Views of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco by W.J. Street.
Golden Gate Bridge Photo Album (Construction images).
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Marin County Civic Center Photo Album, showing the construction of one of FLW’s few West coast buildings. It was later used as the set for Star Trek: Next Generation.
All of these things within just a few miles of one another. Browse the full archive listing.
Administration Building Construction. South end of the Administration Building looking North. Photograph by John Trimble. Harold Stockstad Slide Collection. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library.
View of the Golden Gate way with the Palace of Fine Arts in the foreground; circa March 9, 1935. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library.
Francis Nielson as Isaac in Abraham & Isaac, the first Mountain Play, performed in 1913. Courtesy Anne T. Kent California Room, Marin County Free Library.
Former Vietnam veteran, prison inmate and junkie (“once the needle goes in it never comes out”), Clark has a kind of coiled, unpredictable energy.
– Tobias Grey (‘Photographer Larry Clark’s muses’, Financial Times, Oct. 30, 2010)
Billy Mann 1963. © Larry Clark/Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London.
Printed on the salmon-pink pages of the FT (the global leader in financial news), Larry Clark‘s latest interview about his counterculture subjects and his casual anti-commercial philosophy carries some irony.
Then again, perhaps not. Clark’s refusal to market and remarket his books and prints has led to scarcity – the result? Prices have been driven up:
“Clark refused to let either of his most famous books, the harrowing and explicit Tulsa and Teenage Lust, be republished. He finally did a couple of print-runs with Tulsa 10 years ago, but Teenage Lust is still out of circulation and as such a valuable collector’s item. Earlier this year, at an auction at Sotheby’s in London, a single print from Teenage Lust sold for £7,800.”
In his fifties, Clark learnt to skate to keep up with his cast for Kids. He believes that to photograph a youth culture you have to be in it. It must be difficult for Clark to have the city hall in Paris ban under-18s from entry to Kiss the Past Hello, his exhibition at Musée d’Art Moderne, “I think it’s just the stupidest thing in the world,” says Clark. “I think it’s an attack on youth and on teenagers in general.”
It’s difficult to argue against Clark’s indelible mark on American visual culture. Every hipster, skater, urban-wannabee and romantic sees their lives through the American-Apparel-Levi’s-Ryan-McGinley-Dash-Snow-Hamburger-Eyes-Zoolander-Derelicte images that advertisers, Polaroid & film enthusiasts create as facsimiles to Clark’s seductive and brutal works.
Again, irony reigns as advertisers define a slightly mucky but not diseased world in which they can place their products; a world that looks like Clark’s but is some distance from it. With that in mind, I think Tobias Grey‘s point has some weight:
“As a contemporary and admirer of Diane Arbus and W Eugene Smith, Clark is perhaps the last survivor to bridge the classic era of black-and-white photography and the present.”
Clark has ran and defined the continuum.
Read the article. Clark’s closing empathy for childhood movie stars is surprising and honest; he made collages to honor them.
‘Kiss the Past Hello’, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, until January 2 2011.
PHOTOGRAPHY COVERAGE IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Like last weeks FT article on Leibowitz’s interaction with the market, this portrayal of Clark and his motives is well-written, even endearing. The FT Weekend has had articles on Martin Parr and Cameraless Photography in recent weeks too.
It was a mandatory choice of an airmiles-earned printed daily that brought the FT to my door, but I’ll admit I’m looking forward to my Saturday morning reads more and more.
Last month, I published a piece for Wired.com about Philipp Lohöfener‘s photographs from the Stasi Prison Museum in Berlin.
I make the point that “the prison has been the subject for other photographers including Martin Roemers, Daniel & Geo Fuchs and Daniel Etter, but Lohoefener’s work is the most cohesive essay in describing the cold horror of the site.”
I am a big fan of former prisons that have been reconstituted as sites for education; they will inform about the specifics of the political era in question, but they will also usually double as sites of pedagogy against oppression of human rights applying the narrative at a global level.
Good friend Bob Gumpert will be showing his portraiture from the San Francisco and San Bruno county jails at HOST gallery in London in April of next year.
From Bob’s email this week:
As many of you know I’ve been working since 2006 on the “Take A Picture, Tell A Story” project in the San Francisco County jails. The project continues. I go into the jails about three times a month and post to takeapicturetellastory.com as time and stories allow.
The show will host forums on criminal justice by a number of groups. To make the show and outreach happen we need your help with the following:
1) Referrals with groups/individuals in the UK working in the criminal justice field.
2) Names at US based groups/individuals that might be traveling to England during the exhibit who could speak on the US system.
3) Forwarding this note and flyer to your any of your contacts that might be able to help with contacts or might be able to help with funding by purchasing a print.
Obviously, I have a wild bias in seeing work such as Bob’s getting a wide audience.
Yet, photography from prisons/jails tests the theory that photography shows and delivers stories we otherwise would not see. Bob’s portraits and audio gives voice to the marginalised. Whatever the reasons for their incarceration, no one deserves to be made invisible. Bob’s work empowers his subjects and reveals the limitations of our criminal justice systems.
So, friends stateside and over there in Blighty, get your thinking caps on and see if you can help spread the word and find him some allies (and cash?)
It took “eight tubs of candy and endless cups of coffee” and I presume a whole lot of talent for 14 journalists from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, University of Nebraska and City University London to produce Behind Bars.
It is a multimedia project worth everybody’s time, thought and appreciation.
Behind Bars looks at man angles of the prison experience – Victims, Survivors, Parole Dept. Sweeps, Policing, Racial Segregation, Criminal Justice Law, Three Strikes, Geo-Tagging, Probation, Second Chances.
Behind Bars has 19 videos to view. I picked one out about lifer, Marvin Caldwell, in for 29 years to life for his third strike, a non-capital crime.
Behind Bars is a project of News 21, a national initiative led by 12 of America’s leading research universities with the support of two major foundations to advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of journalism. Universities integrate the schools of journalism more closely with the entire campus in an effort to better teach, challenge and prepare the next generation of news industry leaders for an increasingly complex world.
“Prison companies had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law.”
Remember AZ SB1070? Laura Sullivan shows us the greedy plotting behind it.
In the first of two reports, Sullivan exposes the murky connections between Arizona’s legislators and the private prison companies, and how they manufactured a legal landscape to profit form locking up immigrants.
Basically, there is a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC. It is “a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country.”
In December 2009, ALEC convened in Washington D.C. and in cahoots with Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, wrote a piece of model legislation that four months later was adopted almost unmodified as an Arizona SB1070.
“As soon as Pearce’s bill hit the Arizona statehouse floor in January, there were signs of ALEC’s influence. Thirty-six co-sponsors jumped on, a number almost unheard of in the capitol. According to records obtained by NPR, two-thirds of them either went to that December meeting or are ALEC members.”
“That same week, the Corrections Corporation of America hired a powerful new lobbyist to work the capitol. […] At the state Capitol, campaign donations started to appear.”
“Thirty of the 36 co-sponsors received donations over the next six months, from prison lobbyists or prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation and The Geo Group.”
An absolute scandal.
LAURA SULLIVAN
I have celebrated Sullivan’s reporting before.
Her three-parter on the inequalities and injustices of the bail system is heroic:
Part One: Bail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates
Part Two: Inmates Who Can’t Make Bail Face Stark Options
Part Three: Bondsman Lobby Targets Pretrial Release Programs
NPR
Reporting such as Sullivan’s is, in simple terms, essential. Which brings the illogic and limelight-obsessions of these idiots’ calling for the defunding of NPR into sharp focus.
Golf Five Zero watchtower. Crossmaglen, South Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK. © Jonathan Olley.
Last month, I had a jolly nice chat with a jolly nice chap about what all this means at Prison Photography. Where’s this open journal taking me?
I said if I took this whole thing to the academy, it could be as simple as a historic survey: The Uses of Photography to Represent, Control and Surveil Prison, Prisoners and Publics in the United States (1945 – 2010).
I was encouraged to ditch the historical view and engage the modern. Ask myself, why should anyone care about prisons? Only a small minority care now and that status quo has remained for many reasons tied up in the antagonisms of capitalism. Would a historical survey change minds and attitudes or just lay out on paper the distinctions most people have already made between themselves and those in prison?
Perhaps people would care more if the abuse of human rights that exists within the criminal justice system of America were shown to impinge on everyone, not only on those caught in its cogs?*
What if we consider the methods and philosophies of management used by prisons and identify where they overlap with management of citizens in the “free” society. Think corporate parks, protest policing, anti-photography laws, stop and search, street surveillance, wire taps, CCTV.
My contention has always been that there was no moral division or severance of social contract over and through prison walls. For me it’s never been us & them; it is us & others among us put in a particular institution we call prison.
But, now I am seeing also, there is an ever decreasing division of tactics either side of prison walls. Strategies of management and technologies of discipline perfected in prisons have crept into daily routine.
What has this emphasis on containment and of monitoring – at the expense of education and social justice – done to our society and to our expectations of society?
SURVEILLANCE/CCTV IN PHOTOGRAPHY
And now for the tie in with photography…
Thinking about surveillance, obviously we have the big show at Tate from this Summer, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera with its devoted section to CCTV. (Jonathan Olley‘s work from Northern Ireland is the standout.)
But I always think back to Tom Wichelow‘s series Whitehawk CCTV (1999), possibly because he insists it is not a criticism of CCTV just a look at the politicisation of the human subject viewed through its lens.
Most remarkable in the series is the trio of images of the tragic site of a murder. They reveal to us that looking and bearing witness can be an act of respect as much as that of curiosity as much as an act of control. We are all compelled to look, but some observers are recording the feed and have a disciplinary apparatus to back it up.
Untitled (CCTV footage). Young family visits murder site. Brighton 1999. © Tom Wichelow
Untitled. Friends of murdered boy visit the site. Brighton 1999. © Tom Wichelow
Untitled. Resident reveals murder site outside her bungalow window. Brighton 1999. © Tom Wichelow
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*There’s a simple argument that we all suffer because our tax dollars support a broken system that makes us no safer.
Prison Photography 