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… is the Gursky that got the Poster Boy treatment.
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. With the aid of inmate Renata Abramson (pictured in sceengrab below), Detective Kim Bogucki and Photographer/Film Director Kathlyn Horan co-founded The IF Project and asked ladies at the Washington Corrections Center for Women a single simple question:
“If there was something someone could have said or done that would have changed the path that led you here, what would it have been?”
Simply, the filmed testimonies (also here) and over 300 essays give the public an open line on the difficult lives these ladies have lived.
The lazy definition of ‘choice’ that everybody falls back on to justify punishments meted out upon the disadvantaged in our society – “they chose to do their crime, they do the time” – is exposed by these ladies’ stories. Many of them had no choice, at least not choice that would be obvious to an unloved teenager without any support, example or love.
I also know that The IF Project has expanded into men’s prisons in Washington State. Wonderful news.
IF you wouldn’t have noticed, the lady in the top image is cutting out the Washington Department of Corrections uniform badge.
IF you do anything today, spare 13 minutes for The IF Project trailer.
The IF Project Trailer, Screengrab
Okay, okay, I know DAH is a good photographer and a greater promoter of work.
Seriously, what he does for youngsters in the industry is incredible and he was doing it a long time before the internets allowed him to share his support and passion via burn.
So, I’ll probably take a lot of heat for what I am about to say … like that time I was invited around to a friends house and ended up pissing on the kids’ Christmas presents.
It’s just that, this seems like quite an essay for a time of emergency.
“This calls for immediate action!”
After publishing a few posts about prison tattoos (here, here and here) Klaus Pichler emailed me to tell me about his project ‘Inked for Life: The World of Prison Tattoos‘:
I am a landscape architect and I am currently researching the exercise yards of Austrian prisons, in both spatial and sociological approaches. I am also a photographer.
‘Inked for Life: The World of Prison Tattoos‘ deals with the art of tattooing in the prisons of Central Europe, from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
I am surely not the first one who has done a project about this topic, but the Central European tradition of prison tattooing is genuinely different from the North American, the Latin American and also the Russian/Eastern European style of tattooing.
I have worked more than seven years on this project, and it will be published as a book in late 2010. The project consists of pictures and excerpts of interviews with (mostly) ex-inmates, about tattooing, prison life and prison culture.
I am assuming it is because the book is imminent that Klaus did not provide me jpegs from the Inked for Life series. Klaus did, however, send over these four images from Skeletons in the Closet.
Skeletons in the Closet goes into the long list of photo-projects adopting a distancing view of stores/archives/displays/dioramas of natural history museums, albeit one of the better projects of that ilk … of that trend.
Klaus Pichler‘s entire portfolio is worth a look but I think his studies of people, nay characters, in his Odessa series are particularly good … very good.
So please look at those people shortly after looking at these dead animals!
©Aaron Huey Source: http://www.emphas.is/home.html
PREAMBLE
I just watched a great independent documentary about PsychOps and their widespread use in consumer propaganda. It is no surprise that empire is built on mind-plays upon the populace with regard their daily choices as it is on the mind-plays upon the same populace to sell its military invasions and murder during time of war invasion & occupation in foreign lands.
MEDIA & CONTROL
It’s still too early in the new media game to see if power really can be wrenched from big media – partakers in the psych-ops – and put into hands of the little guys. (And, this is not to suggest that the little guys will make better decisions, but it’d be a shift for sure). But, in terms of media and the stories we want told, can we imagine a media landscape over which we have more control?
We can feed photojournalism directly, if we only imagine ourselves as being in power.
Two tools have come to light this past week which seem feasible.
The first, Flattr, is a web-app which allows the user/recipient (note, I shied from the term ‘consumer’!) to express instant gratitude and give money to the producer of content. Flattr is built into the infrastructure of the web and applies to any and all content, not just photographer and not just journalism.
The second, Emphas.is, pertains specifically to photojournalism. If we are sick of celebrity pap filling our screens should we not be chomping at the bit for a model of production/consumption that is advertisement free and hands us some agency?
WHERE TO PLACE THE EMPHAS.IS
Emphas.is is well aware of the success of the crowd-funded model in other areas of journalism. It seems, in my opinion, to be modeling itself on Spot.Us, progressing the format and making specific its use. I know that the widespread incorporation of the platform – and even the code of the site! – were things that Spot.Us founder Dave Cohn had in mind from the start. Adopt and fine-tune for the benefit of crowd-funded media.
Spot.Us was open to photojournalist pitches, but the platform diluted the impact of PJ work amidst all its other journalistic efforts. It seems like the photo-community would be more secure if it knew it had a place to call its own. In Emphas.is it now does.
Also, in its early stages, Spot.Us necessarily focused regionally, sprouting steadily across US metropolitan regions. Emphas.is looks to have a more global view – which is only right; times and expectations of new media have changed, grown up.
Kickstarter too has served many photographers well, but its reach is even wider than Spot.Us serving mainly creatives.
So, for me at least, Emphas.is seems to fall between Spot.Us and Kickstarter
Emphas.is has an impressive list of endorsements from photo-editors and photographers (Philip Blenkinsop, Carolyn Drake, Jan Grarup, Michael Kamber, Teru Kuwayama, Dominic Nahr, Jerome Sessini, Anthony Suau, Tomas van Houtryve, Kadir van Lohuizen).
Emphas.is is the brainchild of photo editor Tina Ahrens and photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa.
Emphas.is is set to launch early 2011. I think we should start saving our pennies for the first round of pitches.
Bas Princen in partnership with the Architectural Firm OFFICE just received the Silver Lion at the Venezia Biennale in the Architecture category.
His photography is nothing short of stunning. He succeeds on making weird places look even weirder, his images are less forced than Burtynsky but deliver the same inevitable punch of awe and depressing.
We are but ants making larger and larger hills to obliterate the memory of inadequacy delivered by the last.
Alerted to the fact by mrs. deane
Lance Duncan picks okra during a harvest session Friday, August 20, 2010 at the organic garden created by inmates and staff at the Travis County Crorrectional Complex in Del Valle. Duncan was enthusiastic about the garden and said he has been involved with organic vegetable gardening for a couple of years and plans to grow an organic vegetable garden after his release.
Photo by Larry Kolvoord. AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Organic gardens, indeed gardens of any sort, are not uncommon now in prisons of every state. They are, however, used sparingly at only the lowest security facilities. Rikers Island has a program, as do prisons in Washington State. Keep your eye out for more.
Before this post by The Austin American Statesman, I wasn’t aware of the program at Travis County Jail, Texas. Incidentally, Travis County also welcomed Billy Bragg and the JAIL GUITAR DOORS initiative at this years SXSW, which donates guitars to correctional facilities.
Prison Photography 