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Stones. Mark Kirchner
Mark Kirchner has been returning to Manzanar for over 25 years. Kirchner’s project is Manzanar Pilgrimage which focuses on the annual memorial gathering and documents former internees and their families’ stories. Mark explains in his artist statement:
This project is a work in progress. As a photographer, I felt the need to create a visual record as the Japanese American community struggled to preserve the site, its history and legacy. My primary role is that of a witness. The process of witnessing the pilgrimages over many years has given me the time to attempt a holistic photographic document. Within this body of work I hope to make visible those brief moments when the human spirit is revealed. I have discovered that some of the people I have photographed do not see themselves or their actions as historically significant and rarely worth photographing. I hope some of their modesty has been instilled in me.
Inscription: Watanabe. Sentry Post Building, 1984. Mark Kirchner
Inscription: March 30th 194(2) and Kanji. 2006. Mark Kirchner
It is somewhat fortuitous that Mark asked me not to include images of people and that I didn’t wish to include any pictures of people. Manzanar is a peculiar site and certainly not of a human scale. As the Eastern Sierras drop off sharply, the plateau of high desert to the east is a stark landscape. Beautiful, awesome, sublime – yes; livable – barely by today’s standards.
Some could argue that Manzanar should be allowed to recede into the dust and weeds of the California/Nevada borderlands – that humans should never have been interred and nor should human’s need to return. But we are funny creatures and I, for one, appreciate the impression of meaning upon a site once the site has run through its cycle of original use. The dialogue about former sites of incarceration is where one finds responsibility, complexity and community.
Inscription: Remember. Sentry Post Building, 2007. Mark Kirchner
Inscription: Kubota 4-1-42. 1984. Mark Kirchner
Manzanar is a flat site with no place to hide. Everything that is visible is rooted to the ground, and all that is invisible is in the memories and oral histories of the people Mark Kirchner cares so much about. If Kirchner’s concern is preserving the stories of people interred, my concern is his images that reflect that aim. I chose these images because they speak of definites; definite people, dates and action (scribing). They are evidence of existence and time. These images are also all surface which to me summarises the barren desert site.
There is a poetic beauty that one speculates the original scrawler was aware or unaware of – that being, the paradox that the necessary human constructions at Manzanar are those to hold the visible, physical evidence. The concrete is as incongruous to the site at Manzanar as mass human occupation was between 1942 and 1945.
Inscription: Tets Ishikawa, 45, 55, 66, 83. Sentry Post Building, 1984 and 2007. Mark Kirchner
Inscription: Itch 3-30-43. 1983. Mark Kirchner
Kirchner explains further:
Since the annual pilgrimage lasts only a few hours, I knew it would take many years to make the images for the foundation of this work. As the event grew from the intimate Manzanar Pilgrimage and Potluck of the early 1980s to the pilgrimages we experience today, the task of identifying and gathering contact information has grown. After the 2007 pilgrimage I decided to try to contact the people in my photographs. Most of my free time last year was spent in research and correspondence. I have attempted to identify and contact every person photographed on this site. I still have not been 100 percent successful with this effort. I am hopeful that any person that remains unidentified will in time contact me.
If this post can help Mark Kirchner in his noble endeavour I would be thrilled. Tell your neighbours about it!
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Mark Kirchner is an expert bookbinder and salmon flies crafter. Here is his Silver Studios website. Read Kirchner’s biography. Found via photoexchange.
Thanks to Mark Kirchner for his permission to reproduce images and the helpful background information on the project.
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Comment from Mark Kirchner: I like that you picked up on the nature of the artifacts and their relationship to the earth. At one time there were 800 buildings on the site. Now there are 4 buildings.
Hailey, 2, reaches out for a quarter in her fathers hand, Shane Macleod, while her mother Danielle Macleod stares out from the table. Each visitor is allowed to bring $20 of quarters for the vending machine and nothing else. Shane, like all of the inmates in the visiting room must ask his wife and daughter to buy certain snacks, as he is not allowed near the vending machines. During the visits, Shane says, “There is just not a lot to talk about after a while, you can only beat a subject to death for so long.” The couple married four years ago outside of prison, and Shane says, “Prison just really messes up your life.”
Hailey Macleod, 2, look outs across the table at her father, Shane Macleod, and his outstretched hand. Shane was incarcerated two months prior for bank robbery. Shane says. “It gets really stressful sometimes, to have my wife and daughter away from me.”
Elyse Butler repeat-visited New Hampshire State Prison in 2005. She was working as an intern staff photographer at the Concord Monitor in Concord, New Hampshire. The goal of the assignment was to capture the dynamics of relationships in the prison visiting room. Butler documented the behaviours of those within the room; “how these couples, families, and friends interact with each other when they have only a small amount of monitored time to spend together.” I asked a couple of questions.
How did you get access?
In order to get access into the prison we [Concord Monitor] had to contact the PR department and go through a process of paperwork and I had prison officers watching me at all times when I was in the visiting room.
What reactions did the work receive?
After the piece was done we got a great reaction from inmates and families in the visiting room. They were touched to have their time documented with their loved ones.
Heather Metcalf and Mark Vangordon hold hands at table 19 in the visiting room of New Hampshire State Prison. Vangordon is imprisoned for sexual assault and has been in the for a year. Metcalf says, “Not having him home is the hardest part.” When she is not visiting she waits for his letters to hear how he’s doing. During a visit, they are only allowed to have a 15 second embrace at the beginning and end of each visit and otherwise they are only allowed to hold hands above the table.
Lori Tasney and Chris Lang look into each others eyes as Marilyn and Daniel Haldeman hold each other at the end of a visit. Tasney and Lang have been dating for two years and plan to marry when he gets out. His current parole date is set for 2008. Lang was imprisoned for robbery in January 2005. Tasney visits twice a week, which is the most time any inmate is allowed visitors, but says “I would visit every day if I could.”
Mark Langlais plays cards with his brother, inmate Alphee Langlais (right) and his son, inmate Eric Langlias (left) while a mother gives her son one last touch at the end of a visit. This is the first time Alphee and Mark have seen each other since 1996. Mark claims, “Alphee’s been in here since his hair lost its color.” The family was estranged a long time ago, but they claim prison has brought them closer together. Eric was admitted for assault and Alphee was admitted on a parole violation following a prior sexual assault crime. Alphee carries around his inmate request slip as if its a trophy and cried when he finally spoke on the phone with his brother Mark. “This visit has been really special to me, ” Alphee claimed. Eric and his father always fought but no that he is on medication and his father is in counseling, Eric says “it is the closest we’ve ever been … I have always loved my father. I have always wanted him around.”
An inmate and his visitor share a last kiss and 15 second embrace, along with three other couples also saying their goodbyes, at the end of a visit. They started dating 5 months ago, only a month before he went to prison, and she says, “If he ends up having a long sentence, we probably won’t stay together.” He was admitted on a parole violation after an original conviction for multiple robberies and larceny. She says, “I come usually once a week. I hate coming here.”
Biography
Elyse Butler is represented by Aevum Photos. She is one of the hardest working and posting photographers in the business. She previously won College Photographer of the Year Award in 2004 for her documents of the porn industry. She has also photographed the debutante activity of La Jolla. I’d like to hear an interview between Butler, Lauren Greenfield and Wendy Marijnissen on the topic of female identity.
Butler did some nice portraiture in South America, but my favourite project of hers is “From Pond to Purse” which follows the trade of alligator products. Be sure to read Butler’s information on the project at her site in the ‘passion’ category.
BURN Magazine, under the fiscal umbrella of the Magnum Cultural Foundation, have announced a $10,000 grant “to support [the] continuation of the photographer’s personal project. This body of work may be of either journalistic mission or purely personal artistic imperatives”
I am encouraging people to take on the difficult task of securing prolonged and necessary time with a prison/jail/detention-centre population in order to faithfully describe the stories and systems of its particular circumstance. On top of that your product must be “work is on the highest level”.
It’s a tall order but if you have carried out portrait or documentary photography in a site of incarceration before (I know many of you), then submit an application to continue that critical and valuable work. It will have to better than my attempt.
San Pedro Prison, La Paz. July 2008.
Hmm. On the same day I encourage photographers to attempt access into sites designed to be impenetrable, the government and police in my home country have introduced “laws that allow for the arrest – and imprisonment – of anyone who takes pictures of officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.” (British Journal of Photography via In-Public)
BURN Magazine is a new(ish) venture by David Alan Harvey whose got a Magnum portfolio and his own internets.
Jean Gaumy, Prisoners' horseplay. St Martin de Ré. Prison. France. 1978
Preamble: Jean Gaumy puts the fear of God into me. As an art historian, I am supposed to know how to describe and relate his ouevre. Quite honestly, the thought of discussing his work paralyses me. He embodies almost all attributes I respect in fine artists. What words build on his thoughtful photography?
Jean Gaumy. Sports training of prisonners in the walking court. St-Martin-de-Ré. La Citadelle. Prison. 1976
Gaumy’s intellectual curiosity in his subjects – which translates as respect – was an atypical regard for prisoners during the 70s. At that time, he was one of the few photographers paying attention to criminal justice systems. He was the first photojournalist allowed inside French prisons. Les Incarcérés established Gaumy’s reputation as a thoughtful artist who revealed to society its lesser known undertakings.
Sure enough, Danny Lyon was working in Huntsville, Texas in the early 70’s but he was an inheritor of civil rights awareness and his project Conversations with the Dead has always been discussed in political terms first. Perhaps it is an unfair comparison of two great artists working in two different penal systems; perhaps it was easier for Gaumy in France to be neutral and curious. Gaumy operated without the spectre of racism and violence as existed in the South, in Texas and on death row.
Jean Gaumy. Seine-Maritime. Rouen. Prison. France. 1979. Cell-door grating: the old system for serving meals and delivering mail to convicts.
The impression that Gaumy actually cares for his subjects may be a confusion with the possibility he just understood them. A great many of his pictures are so unique (and one presumes a long-time-making) it can be said without doubt he knew his subjects. They knew him well enough to either ignore the camera or look directly at it to communicate clear messages. Let me explain: when a camera first enters an environment it steals the attention and comfort of most subjects. At this point a great many images are of subjects reacting directly to the camera’s novel presence, and of subjects calculating the nature of their relationship to the camera and operator. For this to pass the camera must be around long enough for it to ‘become invisible’. Thereafter, when the subject addresses the camera directly, it is purposeful – with a message – a not as a reflex reaction.
Jean Gaumy, Maison d'arrêt. Caen, France, 1976. Surveillance in the Passageway.
His work is that which enriches the viewer the longer they spend with it. These are not platitudes. Over the course of several years, with craftsmanlike rigour and repeated visits to many institutions, Gaumy pieced together a body of work (ultimately for his 1983 book, Les Incarcérés) that held a mirror to the multitude of attitudes and realities of prison life.
Jean Gaumy. Convict in his Cell, St-Martin-de-Ré. La Citadelle. Prison. 1976
Rather than taking a position or preferring the stories of one group over another Gaumy flits about the different prisons and – through (as I suspect) thorough editing – presents prisons as predictable places that are occasionally enlivened by quirks of human behaviour. Gaumy’s photography shows the machismo of a minority of inmates only after it has shown the solitude of some, the collective boredom of others, the routine awareness of guards and the bureaucratic tasks of the prison itself. There are no stereotypes in Gaumy’s work, and there a very few visual clichés.
Jean Gaumy, St-Martin-de-Ré. Prison. La Citadelle. France. 1976. Administrative procedure for the release of a prisoner.
Gaumy’s craft is the manner in which he casts an even hand over all objects and subjects. His studies of guards at their most relaxed and animated are as interesting as that of the lounging inmate reading his paper (as if a photographer stands in his cell every day). Well perhaps Gaumy did stand in his cell every day … for a period. Such is the familiarity of Gaumy’s portraits some could be mistaken for subjects in their own houses. Now is this Gaumy’s fabrication, or were the institutions of St. Martin-de-Ré; Maison d’arrêt, Caen; Seine-Maritime, Rouen; Ile-de-France, Seine-et-Marne, Melun; and the Calvados, Basse Normandie really as calm as he depicts? There is no violence, barely even tension among the inmate or guard populations.
Jean Gaumy. Transit lock chamber between the walking courts and the cells. St-Martin-de-Ré. Prison. La Citadelle. 1976
Jean Gaumy. Tattooed Prisoner. 1978. Charente Maritime region. Poitou Charentes department. Village of Saint Martin de Ré. La Citadelle. Prison. Saint-Martin de Ré was the departure point for prisoners who were sent to the Cayenne prison in French Guyana. The last shipment of convicts was in 1938.
The only suggestions of violence power Gaumy portrays are the immediate exertions of the weightlifter and, alternatively, the viewers semantically-derived understanding of violence as exhibited in tattoos.
Gaumy makes four individual studies of tattoos. It is hard to comprehend whether Gaumy was original in this. Today we are saturated with images of the tattoo, to the extent that street graffiti, body art and gallery hangings are one and the same; not a year passes without a photojournalist embedding themselves among gangs (either within or without prison) to study the pervasiveness of ink and brevity. Maybe I am biased, but I like to think of Gaumy’s interest in the tattoos of social transgressors, as an artist pioneering a genre in its infancy.
Jean Gaumy. Sports training of prisonners in the walking court. City of Caen. Prison. 1976.
Jean Gaumy. Coming on watch of warders' team. Ile-de-France. Seine-et-Marne. Melun. Prison. 1978
Gaumy kept adding the layers. Unwilling to present only the palatable human side – and seemingly unable to present the darker side of prison life – Gaumy changed his viewpoint. At times his lens was that of a fine artist concerned with shadow and form, at others his eye was that of a faux-Precisionist prompted by the reductive lines of prison architecture. Only Gaumy’s work differed from Charles Sheeler’s et al because of the presence of people – ants; dots; inhabitants. Gaumy’s work, inclusive of crowds, repeats the affections of Lowry. Gaumy’s act of recording is a testament to the physical imprisonment of these French men as Lowry’s was a testament to the social imprisonment of Salford’s working class.
A Street Scene in Clitheroe, L.S. Lowry.
As I write, another (probably meaningless) similarity between the two men springs to mind. Lowry was always drawn to the sea, particularly England’s Northeast coast and the North Sea. He returned to it into his old age. Gaumy late in his career has grappled with the enormity of the oceans. I could hypothesise both artist’s careful handling of mankind derives from an ever-present haunting of that which is larger than mankind. To appreciate the awesome scale of the sea is to wonder at the fragility of man. Ask a surfer … or a fisherman.
Gaumy also manages to reconcile – If one presumes them at opposite ends of the same spectrum – the human scale and the systemic scale of prisons. Couldn’t the three pictures below be by that of a different hand, and yet don’t they make perfect sense grouped together?
Jean Gaumy. "Bonne Nouvelle" prison ("Good news" prison). 2nd section. Walking court. Seine-Maritime. Rouen. Prison. 1979
Jean Gaumy. Walking Courts, Caen. Maison d'arrêt. 1976
Jean Gaumy. "Bonne Nouvelle" prison ("Good news" prison). 2nd section. Walking court. Seine-Maritime. Rouen. Prison. 1979
Gaumy got close in and later retreated right back. Even if this is considered a privilege of a photographer with free passage through the walls of a prison, it does not guarantee good execution. My favourite image is the church service attended by a congregation of boxed men. Gaumy lays bare the crude and incongruous use of discipline and religion, and in doing mocks the scene. The viewer can’t fail but be in agreement with Gaumy; the interaction is absurd and directly contradicts the extraordinary ordinariness of Gaumy’s other scenes.
Jean Gaumy Mass in the chapel. The prisoners are isolated in individual compartments. Caen. Maison d'arrêt. 1976
Gaumy, it seems, didn’t want to extricate himself from the action, nor from the space and time spent on the series. Unwilling to let himself nor the craft of photography off the hook, Gaumy includes three studies of the anthropometric photography room. This is not a Surrealist maneouver, but it does point toward the Postmodernist insistence that the practitioner is an inevitable part of the work. Gaumy never intended to be an objective viewer but rather an active participant (he only ever took photographs with the prisoners consent) and the images below are an open admission of photography’s classifying, even disciplining, function. The camera … the metre-rule … the artificial light … the document … the knowledge … the authority.
Jean Gaumy. Anthropometric photography of a convict at his arrival in prison. Basse Normandie. Calvados. Caen. Prison. 1976
Jean Gaumy. Anthropometric photography of a convict at his arrival in prison. Basse Normandie. Calvados. Caen. Prison. 1976
Without doubt, Gaumy was fortunate to have a wild-haired caricature sitting for this particular anthropometric observation. The docile subject is the perfect compliment to the act of observation and documentation. The treatment of this prisoner is akin to expedition-photography that attempted to measure the anatomical dimensions of colonised peoples and thus provide scientific evidence for Western genetic superiority. This appreciation is the perfect close to a series throughout which Gaumy balances his artistic aims, social purpose, photography’s interferences and the loaded history of Modern taxonomic praxis. Gaumy dismantles assumed norms and hierarchies of social order and allows the viewer to meditate on the subtleties of carceral systems.
I escaped my paralysis, jolted by the news that last week Jean Gaumy was awarded the Peintre de la Marine (Painter of the Fleet) by the French Ministry of Defence. Gaumy is only the fifth photographer to join the select circle, which is composed of only 40 members.
For a full biography and portfolio please visit the pages of Magnum Photo Agency.
The folkology (keyword tags) within the Magnum archive are inconsistent. Different sets of Gaumy’s images turn up for different searches. Here is another isolated set for St-Martin-de-Ré. La Citadelle also from 1976. I would encourage readers to search at length Gaumy’s work throughout the different institutions with permutations on keyword searches.
Chris Jordan was low on my list of priorities but this timely post by Mike Kelley at Change.org (a blog as impressive for its readers’ comments as it is for the straight forward presentation of Jordan’s work) compelled me to bump it up and champion the depressingly and unfathomable figures that arise when one simply runs the numbers.
Chris Jordan. Prison Uniforms, 2007. 10x23 feet in six vertical panels. Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world.
In reading Change.org’s straight forward commentary on America’s broken criminal justice system, I signed up for Change.org and read a few of their older posts. In doing so I was presented with the catalyst to comment on Obama’s momentous inauguration without repeating the media-lovefest that has surrounded the 44th’s swearing in. This post will cover Jordan’s astounding artwork, Obama’s astounding tasks-at-hand and where they politically overlap.
Chris Jordan. Prison Uniforms, 2007. Partial zoom.
Chris Jordan has spent his time making larger and larger photographic constructions to communicate the scale at which American society wastes its resources, its environmental future and its grasp on logic. In his effort to catalogue the linear and thoughtless waste of the US, he has progressed from crushed automobiles, to cell phone chargers, to polystyrene cups to American prisoners.
Jordan is a bright guy, now consumed by his photography (which to be quite frank is eco-hip and brilliantly executed). He talks passionately about a sea-change in our cultural consumption. He specialises in highlighting “the behaviours that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level … the actions we are in denial about and the ones that operate below our daily awareness … like when you’re mean to you wife because you’re mad about something else or when you drink too much at a party because you’re nervous.” Jordan is no prophet, he just sees the necessary u-turn we must all make in our habits and thoughts to move toward sustainable existence.
Chris Jordan. Prison Uniforms, 2007. 10x23 feet in six vertical panels. Detail at half actual size.
I like to think the strength of Jordan’s visual framework that deals with soda cans to the landfill as it does with prisoners to the cell blocks is deliberate. As hard as it is to acknowledge, the majority of Americans have turned their back on a seven-figure-minority as if it were worth no more thought than discarded packaging. Mass imprisonment is the result of widespread apathy, denial and unpinnable responsibility. How unconscionable is this situation? We are all responsible. Barack Obama talked very little about criminal justice and prison policy during his electioneering. This is not surprising as helping the invisible incarcerated masses is on the electorate’s mind as much as the whereabouts of their last twinkie wrapper. But, Obama also made it very clear that this was the time for personal responsibility and accountability.
Chris Jordan. Prison Uniforms, 2007. Installed at the Von Lintel Gallery, NY, June 2007.
So after a week of photography gallery after gallery, the militarised eye vs. the personal touch, Gigapan-assisted user-generated snooping, faux controversy, minor mishaps, cult worship, sentimental clap-trap, unending debate, media catfights, nerdcore details, celeb fluff and even UFO’s isn’t it time we adopt the same realism that Obama trusted in for his inaugural speech?
A wonderful article from the Wall Street Journal lays out the realism and “the audacity of hope behind bars”. (Via Change.org). Angola prisoner, Mr. Dennis served up some REALISM: “He’s got his hands full: Two wars, the economy is going in the tank and the health-care costs are skyrocketing – I’d be surprised if he has time to brush his teeth in the next four years.” While another prisoner took care of the HOPE: “If the men here can have hope, then why can’t the rest of the country?”
Prisoners at Louisiana State Penitentiary ("Angola") were given the day off to watch Barack Obama inaugurated as America's 44th president.
So how does this all connect? Jordan and Obama share the same call to think, with serious intent, about the things invisible to us. Both call us to consider the reality of our society and accept our shared responsibility for its faults, weaknesses and injustices. Both men challenge conventional wisdom; the logic that just because we didn’t turn the key nor bring down the gavel, we are not complicit – by our silence – in America’s mass incarceration.
What can you do? You can start by signing this petition immediately and by using web2.0 to access Obama’s administration as his team reached you during the election.
If you’d like to know more about Chris Jordan you could do worse than starting with this interview, this interview and this interview.
After spending the last 50 years of his life behind bars, 75 year old Earl Reinhardt is about to be set free. He is completely unprepared and has no money, no destination, and no family or friends to help him when he walks out the prison door. Sarah Bones
“What happens when a 75 year old who has spent his last 50 years behind bars gets released?” This is the questions Sarah Bones asks in a careful study of Earl. Earl has no plans, no money and no destination. He makes this clear to those in positions to aid his assimilation into society and yet, after he leaves prison, he predictably turns up homeless and seemingly alone.
At an exit interview in Laural Highlands SCI in Somerset, Pennsylvania, Earl tells the prison social workers that he doesn't want to leave and he is confused about where to go and how to survive. Sarah Bones
Bones does an excellent job with the captions pointing out the realities of Earl’s modest life – keeping warm in the library, eating at soup kitchens, avoiding queues at the health center, unable to find work, wearing the same prison jacket – only with his name crossed out. Earl explains over coffee that living homeless is tough and he wishes he was back inside. Bones’ photography is evidence that for a lot of former inmates the common experience after release is homelessness. Being outside the prison walls is to be outside all walls.
Earl thinks that if he keeps a low profile and stays quiet they will forget to release him. Sarah Bones
Earl is unable to wrap his head around his imminent reentry into the free world so he shuffles and hides around the prison hoping the prison authorities will forget about him. I think the same denial would strike pensioner who hadn’t walked free since the early 1950s as a young twenty-something.
Still wearing his prison jacket only now with his name crossed out, Earl stands underneath an abandoned storefront roof to stay dry. Sarah Bones.
After Earl’s release Bones searched for him. She found him in his home town a few hours from the prison. He had taken greyhound. For three months, Earl lived on the streets. He fell down some stairs, and thereafter was admitted to Reading hospital. Earl was hospitalised for 8 weeks and then taken into permanent nursing home care. During his three months on the street, Earl often showed his prison ID to people he met. His institutional identity was one of the few things he had, and when he ended in up in permanent nursing care one feels that a return to an institution, without the stresses of life outside, was a positive result for Earl. Maybe.
Earl flashes his prison ID photo card when approached. It is all that he has to show for himself. Sarah Bones
There have been several photo essays done about prison release, but often they feature men with a story to define based on their own choices. These men are younger prisoners who usually return to complex communities, daily decisions, and family interaction. Or the inmate is the exonerated after an overturned sentence. Vance Jacobs did a great series covering Alan Crotzer’s story of exoneration after 25 years for a crime he didn’t commit.
Earl’s case seems very different. It doesn’t seem Earl had many choices … or ones that he was aware of. Sarah Bones completed this series in 2002/03. Earl died in July 2005.
Of Bones’ other work, I am particularly struck by three photographs from East Africa which includes two heart–wrenching portraits of AIDS sufferers shunned by their families and a top-drawer portrait which deserves an essay in itself. Please view Bones’ other photo essays on Rwandans lives 15 years after the genocide and her Lightstalkers gallery which includes her work for the Sierra Leone Global Action Foundation.
Sarah S. Bones is a self-taught, award-winning, internationally-exhibited photographer. Sarah saved for her first 35mm camera at age 13. She has documented peoples’ stories in Cuba, Guatemala, Kenya, India, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Tanzania. In the Pennsylvania area, she has photographed in prisons, homeless shelters and on political campaigns. Bones tells the stories of men, women, and children who are voiceless and too often ignored by the popular media.
Update: Prison Photography collated a Directory of Photographic & Visual Resources for Guantanamo in May 2009.
Guantanamo Prisoner, Political Graffiti. Banksy
Anyone who says the recent media tour of Guantanamo isn’t a public relations exercise by the lame duck has not had their eyes open. Global media were given a tour of camps 4, 5 and 6 at Gitmo and all the footage was screened and vetted before release.
Video: Here is the Guardian’s three minute offering. With any hope Obama will put this illegal operation out of action in 2009.
Artistic legacy of Guantanamo
Guantanamo Protesters outside the US Embassy, London
Meanwhile, we can think of the potency that the orange jump-suit has gained. It’s another icon of the Bush presidency. With regard it’s establishment and its bare-faced operations, Guantanamo was far outside of the public’s imagination. Our culture stomached the guilt and under the Bush administration it was never likely Guantanamo prison would be brought back into line with international law. Activist and non-activist art protested Guantanamo by subverting the camp’s own visual vocabulary.
UHC Collective. "This is Camp X-Ray". Art Installation, Manchester, 2003. Guards with replica guns were on duty 24 hrs and followed a regime copied from media reports.
Back on my home turf in Manchester, UHC, a notoriously bold and inventive art collective, scaled up a version of Camp X-Ray on an unused lot in Withington. It was complete with guard towers, fake guns and orders and activity that replicated the media’s reports of Guantanamo, Cuba. See other UHC Projects here, and read the BBC report here.
Road to Guantanamo (2006). A Michael Winterbottom Film, Spanish Release
And while we are not focusing entirely on photography, slightly off topic with video, I cannot recommend Road to Guantanamo highly enough. The film tells the ridiculous story of three young British-Pakistanis who were in the wrong place at the wrong time (southern Afghanistan, November 2003), and ended up in Guantanamo for 2 years. Your jaw will not leave the floor.
When intellectual withdrawal sets in, I stem the tide and sate the need at a handful of reliable dispensaries. It would seem that two weeks ago, three of my favourite cartophiles (not a word) jumped on the same bandwagon boat. The boldest at-sea-heist of the modern era had just taken place, and it seemed the misfortunes and misadventures on petrochemical distribution routes were top of everyone’s agenda. Spurred by a AP photo in the New York Times (below), the indubitable Brian Finoki focused on the inseparable threads of the pirate clique, theorising that without their vessel, the posse of pirates had only each other to stay afloat in the hard concrete prison yards of Mombasa.
Eight Somali pirates sat at the Kenya Ports Authority Port Police station in Mombasa, where they are being held after being handed over to the Kenyan authorities by the Royal Navy. The eight pirates were arrested, and three others killed, by sailors of HMS Cumberland, as they attempted to hijack a cargo ship off the Horn of Africa. The pirates will be charged in a Mombasa court. Credit: AP
BLDGBLOG was twisting its melon, highlighting improv google map action along with the official sounds coming out of the International Maritime Bureau and its Live Piracy Report. Meanwhile, InfraNet Lab could only conclude that piracy was the opportunist’s career of choice given the current absence of government in Somalia.
I need my own bent on this and so refer you to Jehad Nga‘s phenomenal Pirates Inc. Somalia photo essay depicting pirates under lock and key in Boosaaso Jail & Mandhera Prison, Somalia. Nga is no slouch – he has (largely self-funded) returned to Somalia repeatedly over the past three years. It is incredibly dangerous to work within Somalia. It is more dangerous, in some regards, than in Iraq or Afghanistan where journalists can rely on isolated cordoned-safe-green-military zones and when at large, can work embedded with Western forces. But Nga is no stranger to Iraq either; as foto8 reminds us, “Nga has worked widely in Iraq on assignment for the New York Times. His image of blindfolded Iraqi prisoners arrested by US forces was used as the main publicity shot for the Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side“.
Pirates imprisoned in Boosaaso's main jail. Photo: Jehad Nga for The New York Times
I would like Nga’s images and words to represent themselves. Words: here’s an indepth interview, from September 2008, with Nga about the situation in Somalia. Images: I have accompanied Nga’s (dare I say it) Carravagioesque prints with his own website commentary about the project:
Nga: Looking over that Somaliland naval map I noticed that the Gulf of Aden (the narrow band of ocean that separates Somalia and Yemen) and the Somali cost line were littered with upward of 100 little skull and cross bone flags. Black flags to denote ships that were successfully taken by pirates and gray for ships that were attacked by pirates but managed to escape. Most of these flags are black.
(Clockwise from Top Left) Mohamed Mahamoud Mohamed; Abdi Rashid Ismael Abdullahi; Farah Ismael Eid; and Abdullahi Mahamoud Mohamed, are each serving 15 years for a piracy conviction. "Believe me, a lot of our money has gone straight into the government's pockets," Farah Ismael Eid said. His pirate team typically divvied up the loot this way: 20 percent for their bosses, 20 percent for future missions, 20 percent for the gunmen on the ship, and 20 percent for government officials. Photo: Jehad Nga for The New York Times
Housed in the Mandhera Prison in Somaliland are 719 inmates 5 of whom are serving 15 yrs sentences handed down to them for their involvement in Somalia’s thriving pirate industry.
Photo: Jehad Nga
The autonomous region of Somaliland is doing their part to combat the growing influx of pirates in the gulf and coastal areas. Utilizing the small fleet of gunboats and navy personnel, they patrol their waters and on occasion escorts’ ships coming in from Yemen. Somalia, in stark contrast to Somaliland, still suffers from the turmoil that has put the country on the map for many people for the last 17 yrs, when the country made a dramatic turn from relative stability to brutal civil war in 1991.
Prisoners. Photo: Jehad Nga
Pensive and quiet the 5 men sat surrounded by prison guards and told their stories of how and why, before one by one they were ushered away and led back to their various cells shared amongst the general population of criminals in the eight block prison set miles out into the arid desert.
In recent months the port town of Boosaaso has also made a name for itself as the kidnap capital of Africa. Previously known best for being the main hub for human smuggling for Somalis eager to flee to nearby Yemen and usually coasting them their lives. With piracy on the rise and stakes getting higher, it is rumored that the money trails lead to some top government officials in the area – due to the large sums of money pirates now demand in return for a seized vessel.
Inside the Prison. Photo: Jehad Nga
Traveling through Boosaaso it is necessary and commonplace to hire a security details consisting upward of 10 local militia to be a deterrent for anyone hoping to cash in on captured a western journalist that, in the past year, has proven to fetch a good price. Maneuvering through Boosaaso we traveled with our rented army toward Boosaaso‘s main jail where currently 100 captured pirates sit out their long sentences or await trial.
In Boosaaso, if the kidnappers don’t find you the extreme heat always finds a way. In an open and shadeless courtyard, two facing jail blocks contain hundreds of prisoners literally caged to bake in the sun. The heat so heavy against your back. It was not only the hope of better pictures that tempted me to enter these filthy concrete boxes, but also escape from the looming mid day sun heavy over head.
"Pirates, pirates, pirates," said Gure Ahmed, a Canadian-Somali inmate of the jail. "This jail is full of pirates. This whole city is pirates." Photo: Jehad Nga for The New York Times
As I approached the iron bars of the blocks movement is heard and then and as came closer murmurs grew into rumbles and further until the deafening sounds of hundreds of inmates came crashing against me like a wave of anger and despair. [They] stretched their arms through the bars inviting us to listen to their stories of how they were dying in this place. Of how each of them was suffering from one disease or another.
Inmates of Boosaaso Jail. Photo: Jehad Nga
Beyond the out reached hands just eyes and parts of their faces could be made out inside the lightless rooms. Figures moving in and out of the small amount of light streaming in from the between the blue painted bars.
A prison guard inside Mandhera Prison. Photo: Jehad Nga for The New York Times
As pirates are proud of their catch so are the guards of these jails. They know that their numbers will remain consistent as long as Pirate season persists in the Somali waters. No slow down is the trend in expected as little international help has been organized, and with numbers of active pirates in these waters continuing to grow even that help seems, in some ways, futile.
View Jehad Nga’s other work at his website
View his New York Times photo essay here
Read an interview with a pirate here
Prison Photography 