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Over two million individuals are behind bars in U.S. prisons, living in isolation from their families and their communities. Prison/Culture surveys the poetry, performance, painting, photography & installations that each investigate the culture of incarceration as an integral part of the American experience.
As eagerly as politicians and contractors have constructed prisons, so too activists and artists have built a resistance. Nowhere are these two forces pushing against one another as forcefully as in California. The book, Prison/Culture, compiles the documents of a two year collaboration between San Francisco State University, Intersection for the Arts (one of San Francisco’s oldest art non-profits) and prison artists & outside activists across the US.
Mark Dean Johnson’s essay summarises the visual/cultural history of incarceration; from Gericault’s institutionalized mentally ill subjects and his paintings of severed heads as protest against capital punishment, to Goya’s prison interiors of the inquisition; from Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Lincoln’s assassin Lewis Payne (1865), to Otto Hagel’s portrait of Tom Mooney (1936); and from Ben Shahn’s murals against indifference to the conditions of immigrant workers (1932) to the work of Andy Warhol and David Hammons in the modern era.
Johnson guides this lineage to the Bay Area, describing how Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison became the conversation topic of Bay Area coffeehouses and classrooms (Foucault began lecturing at UC Berkeley in 1979). The swell of interest in Foucault’s structuralism coincided with a grassroots expansion of prison art in the early 1980s.
For text, the editors of Prison/Culture made two canny and provocative choices: Angela Y. Davis and Mike Davis (no relation).
THE TEXT
Firstly, in a 2005 interview, America’s most notorious prison abolitionist Angela Davis sets out – in her most accessible terms – how our prison industrial complex serves primarily as a tactical response to the inadequate or absent social programs following the end of slavery. Abolition was successful in that it redefined law, but it failed to truly develop alternative, democratic structures for racial equality. Powerful stuff, yet even newcomers to Davis’ argument won’t be as shocked as they may expect to be. She’s that good.
Next up, Mike Davis’ 1995 essay ‘Hell Factories in the Field’ is a bittersweet ‘I-told-you-so’-inclusion. Davis has made a specialty of dealing with – in stark academic prose – disaster scenarios, race-based antagonism and the environmental rape of recent Californian history. When Davis witnessed the mid-nineties expansion of the prison industrial complex (or as Ruth Gilmore Wilson terms it ‘The Golden Gulag’) he foresaw prisons’ economic band-aid utility for depressed towns; foresaw the mere displacement of violence; foresaw the assault on fragile family ties; foresaw the unconstitutional prison overcrowding and predicted the collective collapse of moral responsibility.
Davis’ article focused on the then new California State Prison, Calipatria – and not in a dry way. Paragraphs are devoted to recounting the installation of the world’s only birdproof, ecologically sensitive death fence following impromptu electrocutions of migrating wildfowl. The editors note, as of 2008, Calipatria’s facility design of 2,208 beds was 193% over-capacity with 4,272 inmates. Where birds saw an improvement in their lot, prisoners certainly did not, have not.
THE ART
Contributors include some well-known names – RIGO, (here on PP) Sandow Birk, Deborah Luster and Richard Kamler whose works address incarceration, criminal profiling, wrongful conviction, prison labor, and the death penalty. The book also includes poetry by Amiri Baraka, Ericka Huggins, Luis Rodriguez, Sesshu Foster and others but I shall not comment on these wordsmiths (their work is beyond my purview) other than to say they are talented and politically in the right place.
Special mention must go out for Deborah Luster’s One Big Self project (more here). In my personal opinion, it is the single most important photographic survey of any US prison. It is certainly the most longitudinal. Over a five year period, Luster visited the farm-fields, woodsheds, rodeos and national holiday & Halloween events throughout Louisiana’s prisons. She became a loved and recognized figure among the prison population; she estimates she gave away 25,000 portraits to inmates. Luster’s conclusion? Even mass photography struggles to communicate the vast numbers of men and women behind bars.
In 2003, artist Jackie Sumell collaborated with Herman Joshua Wallace (one of the Angola 3) on the design of his “Dream House”. The project The House That Herman Built is heartbreaking and bittersweet.
Alex Donis employs cunning and cutting humour for his series WAR. He sketches criminal “types” with figures of authority (policemen, prison guards) mid-dance, often bumping and grinding. He even conjures a kiss between Crips and Bloods gang members.
Also unexpected is the visual testimony of condemned mens’ last requested meals. For The Last Supper, Julie Green painstakingly painted porcelain plates with the last meals of nearly 400 executed men. Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize a few years ago, in large part due to his vases of abuse, bigotry and social ills. This clever use of regent materials has also been adopted by Penny Byrne for her Guantanamo Bay Souvenirs which sets up interesting parallels and a new turn for discourse between US homeland prisons and those used for the “Global War About Terror” (GWAT).
Relating to GWAT, Aaron Sandnes established a sound sculpture in which gallery visitors were subjected to the same pop songs used in Psych-ops by police and military interrogators.
Dread Scott‘s use of audio is intentionally to give silenced men a voice. (Scott has talked about the primacy of audio in his exhibition of prison portraits previously at Prison Photography).
Mabel Negrete collaborated with her brother incarcerated in Corcoran State Prison. She mapped out the floorplan of his cell as compared to her apartment bathroom. She then developed a dramatic dialogue in which she played both herself and her brother. (No images unfortunately.)
Traced – but essentially fictional – lines of structure are fitting for San Francisco, the city in which world-famous architect/installation artists Diller & Scofidio got their start with the architectural memories of the Capp Street Project. Negrete’s CV is extensive, she was instrumental in organising Wear Orange Day, a prisoner awareness action. Also check out her Sensible Housing Unit.
Cross-prison-wall collaborations are vital to the project as a whole; so much so, that without input from prisoners, the entire enterprise would fall short. Primarily, it is the men of the Arts in Corrections: San Quentin run by the William James Association who deliver acrylics and oils of optimistic colour and profound introspection. More here.
Collaboration as delivered in a multimedia and digital format comes by way of Sharon Daniel’s Public Secrets. Public Secrets “reconfigures the physical, psychological, and ideological spaces of the prison, allowing us to learn about life inside the prison along several thematic pathways and from multiple points of view.”
In closing, it is worth noting that San Quentin prison (only 12 miles north of San Francisco) has one of the few remaining prison arts programs in the state following 20 years of cut backs. The works in Prison/Culture challenge – as Deborah Cullinan & Kurt Daw, in their foreword, suggest – “traditional boundaries between inside and outside, between professional and amateur, between institutions and people” and, “by juxtaposing work by professional artists with artists who are working inside a prison, this book challenges us to rethink notions of community and culture.”
Prison/Culture is simultaneously a consolidation of achievement, a fortification of resources and celebration of resistance. This may be a book with a Californian focus, but it has national and international relevance. Succinct, well researched, egalitarian and lively. For me, Prison/Culture is the best collection of works by any US prison reform art community up until this point in history.
The resource list of over 80 organisations at the back of the book (page 92) is ESSENTIAL reference material for anyone looking to commit energies into prison art programs. All told, this book is a must read for those interested in the artistic landscape of our prison nation. It powerfully exposes the vast gulf between criminal justice and social justice in US society.
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Prison/Culture is published by City Lights, edited by Sharon E. Bliss, Kevin B. Chen, Steve Dickison, Mark Dean Johnson and Rebeka Rodriguez.
Read a Daily Kos review here, and view images from a 2009 exhibition here.
City Lights Celebrates the Release of Prison/Culture
On Thursday, May 6 at 7:00 pm, join Steve Dickison, Jack Hirschman, Ericka Huggins, and Rigo 23 for a reading and book release celebration at City Lights Books. Tune in to KQED Forum at 9:00 am PDT the morning of the event for an interview with the book’s editors and contributor Angela Davis.
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Images (from top): PRISON/CULTURE book front; Sandow Birk; Deborah Luster; Exhibition views of The House That Herman Built; Alex Donis; Alex Donis; Alex Donis; Julie Green; Julie Green; Ronnie Goodman, San Quentin inmate, displays his work; and ‘Public Secrets’ screenshot.
After my post about Safe Harbour series, the photographer Jeff Barnett-Winsby (diviner of pure-story-gold) got in touch. He told me he was going to advance the project further than the web-housed stills and weave the tale of escaped prisoner, manipulated lover and fugitive love-run into a book.
The photographic series Love, Notes and Promised Freedom has morphed into the mature bookspined Mark West and Molly Rose. Here’s the blurb:
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This is a wacky tale and a swift departure from the serious stuff that often weighs heavy on the soul at Prison Photography. Perhaps that why I like it so much. Buy Mark West and Molly Rose.
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Mark West and Molly Rose is published by J&L Books. The owner of J&L Books Jason Fulford was recently interviewed at Too Much Chocolate as was Jeff
Prison Valley, a documentary by David Dufresne & Philippe Brault, is a haunting view of a one of America’s greatest distopias.
From the introduction: “Welcome to Cañon City, Colorado. A prison town where even those living on the outside live on the inside. A journey into what the future might hold.”
16% of the Cañon City population is inside prison; it is an economy based almost entirely upon incarceration.
Cañon City has a population of 36,000 and 13 prisons, one of which is Supermax, the new ‘Alcatraz’ of America. The new Supermax was described by former warden, Robert Hood, as “a clean version of hell.”
The introduction to the documentary can be a little off-putting at first. The dramatic voice-over deals in emotive-speak and apparent hyperbole. But then you realise that the presentation is not an exaggeration – that the voice-overs are only shocking because of the underlying immutable facts.
Perhaps, as outsiders, French filmmakers Dufresne & Brault are the perfect artists to bring focus upon the most forsaken branch of America’s prison industrial complex?
WEB DISTRIBUTION
As well as taking on old(ish) prison subject matter in a new way, Prison Valley is purposefully designed as a web based project and “Web Documentary”. To view the film beyond its introduction you must sign in with either your Twitter or Facebook social network accounts.
Once signed in the website will bounce you between a mixture of multimedia, interviews, photo-galleries, non-sequitur video clips and auxiliary documents.
The documentary canvases opinion from various characters who the filmmakers meet along the way. The entire project is punctuated with the use of DVD-special-featuresque snippets. You can even attend a memorial ceremony for dead correctional officers.
BLOG
Prison Valley blog here.
Central Juvenile Hall, Los Angeles, California 2009.
Richard Ross has pushed live the online component of his latest project Juvenile-In-Justice.
It seems as if this is a natural development from his project Architecture of Authority. For some, it would be quite worrying if Ross had studied oppressive architecture without following up with inquiry into the vulnerable lives within.
American youth is a vogue topic for photographers; Ross’ work (tactically or innocently) should not be excluded from any national narrative about US teenage experience.
Red Cliff Ascent, Enterprise, Utah 2008
Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center, Biloxi, Mississippi 2009.
Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, Ventura, California 2008
“To date, I have photographed Angel’s Flight (L.A.), group homes, foster homes, ICE juvenile holding, Los Prietos Boys Camp, LAPD, SFPD, EL Paso PD, Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, Santa Barbara Juvenile Correctional facility, Sexual Assault Response Team Examination Rooms, interview and exam rooms for sexually abused children, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, Children of the Night (Van Nuys), JHS, Montessori classrooms, Maryvale (a former orphanage), CPS interview rooms, El Paso Juvenile Courtrooms, half-way houses, reform schools, maximum security Giddings, TX, lock-down and nonlock-down shelters, SW Keys, ORR, ICE, DHS, and CBP to name a few. I have primarily focused on kids that are not the “Kids R Us” type of juvenile, but rather minors that become part of a system because they have failed, or their families have failed them, or their society has failed them. Earl Dunlap, the Director of Cooke County Detention Center, welcomed me to his facility with the words: “Welcome to the gates of hell.”
I am trying to get the broadest range of images and texts. I recently photographed a family that has two grown sons, yet took in two separated brothers and two separated sisters in foster care in order to reunite the siblings and start a second family. So there are some positive and quite inspirational portions of my research as well.”
Suicide Practice Dummy, Fairbanks Youth Facility, Fairbanks, Alaska 2010
New Beginnings Juvenile Rehabilitation Facility, Washington D.C. 2009
(via)
© Beb C. Reynol
Last month, I met social documentary photographer Beb Reynol.
For the past five years, Reynol has concentrated his documentary work in Central and south Asia, specifically in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reynol has been an Artist in Residence at the Photographic Center Northwest and is now on its faculty.
In 2005, Reynol trained local photojournalists in Kabul with AINA, the non-governmental organization founded by veteran photojournalist Reza Deghati. AINA aims to rebuild the Afghan’s freedom of expression through journalism.
Whenever I look at imagery from the AfPak region I am consciously looking for work that does not depict military engagement. It was for that reason I was drawn to Reynol’s series of Afghan Coalminers.
Lit only by headlamps, the miners discuss the conditions of the shaft and their approach to the coal seam. Kar-kar, Afghanistan, May 10th, 2005. © Beb C. Reynol
© Beb C. Reynol
Beb’s The Cost of Coal in Afghanistan statement:
During past decades, Afghanistan has only known a succession of conflicts: the Soviet occupation, the Afghan civil war, the rise and fall of the Taliban and today American and allied military engagement. These wars ruined economic development and eroded the vitality of the Afghan population. Coal, abundant in Afghanistan, is an essential fuel used for the production of electricity, making it a basic need.
When Russian forces occupied the country in 1979, they sent their own engineers to run the large-scale production of natural resources. I visited a mine (difficult to access due to its geographical location) 12 kilometres northeast off Pol-e-Khomli. During the Soviet occupation, more than 2000 miners extracted the black gold from the mine. Today, the 150 employed miners barely cover the vast site and the hundreds of formerly excavated galleries.
Often working at a depth of more than 360 metres, the miners extract coal with only shovels and pick-axes in hand, battery powered lamps on top of their heads, and old equipment once imported from Czechoslovakia. Intense heat, total darkness and the risk of explosion from methane gas make coal-mining very difficult and dangerous.
The limited local demand for coal makes the mining far from profitable. Lacking reliable transportation and security infrastructure, the Afghan government is unable to exploit the fossil fuel. While the present war against the Taliban wages on, the country seems to be losing grip on its most wanted resource.
Coal mine, Kar-kar, Afghanistan, May 11th, 2005. © Beb C. Reynol
© Beb C. Reynol
I have also been thinking about Jim Johnson’s recognition of “powerful installment[s] in what should be considered a photographic tradition depicting men who work in extractive industries.”
If you are looking for a one-stop-shop for the visual politics of mining in photography then look no further than Jim’s posts labeled ‘Miner’.
Casey Orr‘s Comings & Goings is an inquiry into movements and migration. Comings & Goings is a photographic series in three parts. Families considers the prisoners and their loved ones at Her Majesty’s Prison Leeds, UK.
Caged Birds depict the imported pigeons and parrots and parakeets of West Yorkshire, while Migrant Women portrays the recent newcomers to Orr’s county.
Orr insists the three parts be considered together – they are a whole, cannot be separated, and toy with the idea of interconnectedness Orr has grappled with throughout her career.
Comings & Goings proposes that foreign and indigenous are not so far apart. As Orr puts it we all share “a desire to be free, an instinct to nest, to seed, to move and be alive”.
Orr’s work requires time and care to navigate – it is as delicate as it is pioneering. Prints from all three parts were displayed was on the outside walls of HMP Leeds. It was the first time the wall of a UK prison has been used as a gallery space.
I wanted to know a bit more and so emailed Casey.
Q & A
Why did you decide to incorporate H.M.P Leeds into your Comings and Goings project? Was it the subject or the challenge of working within a prison or a mixture of the two?
My photographic work makes connections to my community and to my experience of living here in Armley, Leeds. My interest in the prison came from other projects I’ve done here. I’m always looking for the connection between the things and people I photograph, the systems that operate and seem to run through everything.
The town of Armley is very much built from the systems of power that came through the Industrial Revolution; Armley Mills, once the largest mill in the world, is now the Leeds Industrial Museum; the Leeds Liverpool Canal is now used for leisure; and the incoming migrant communities are moving from their countries for very contemporary reasons, the jobs available to them (and everyone else in Leeds) having much more to do with information technology than agriculture or textiles.
Within all of this movement, stands HMP Leeds, known locally as Armley Jail. It sits on a hill, built in 1847, so that workers in the surrounding mills could be reminded of what would happen if they stepped out of line. The prison (along with a massive, imposing Victorian church) is one of the few buildings around here still used for its original purpose.
The systems of power associated with the panopticon are still firmly in use in the prison. The prison walls, inside my community, seem to be impenetrable, and enclose a community of thousands of prisoners and workers. My interest was in the walls and how to find the connection into the prison, how to link the people inside with all of the flows of life going on outside.
I found that connection through families, through children. Hundreds of families visit their fathers, sons and brothers every week. The families and loved ones are a direct link with the communities outside. I wanted to exhibit the family portraits on the outside walls of the prison because the prison walls are such a architectural staple of this community they can become invisible, people can forget about them and the people behind them. The exhibition was shown on the interior walls as well so that the people inside were seeing the same thing, the same ideas were being shared; walls penetrated by ideas, and by art.
What negotiations did you go through to gain access? Who did you meet? How did it come about?
As a documentary photographer, very little of my time is actually taking pictures, mostly I am trying to gain access to people and places. Before contacting the prison direct I talked to many people in this community and finally went to the Jigsaw Project, the family support unit. From there I met many of the workers who support the families. They were sympathetic to my ideas and introduced me to the Head of Security. From there I met the Governor. All of this took many months. The work, finally shown on the walls as a public art installation as part of the West Leeds Arts Festival in 2009, went through many security checks.
How many times did you go to the visiting room to make the portraits?
I spent a few months in the visitors centre, talking to families, and asking who would like to be a part of the project. Obviously, I got to know them better than the prisoners who I met briefly during the sessions. I spent four days in total in the visiting room.
How did the prisoners and staff respond to your project?
Most people were really supportive of the idea. the thing about photography is that it has uses on many different levels. So this record of families I wanted to make could also be a part of their personal family archive. The fact that I’m able to give something back to people, something useful, like a family portrait, makes me feel better about the fact that I’m asking so much of people, to use their image for one of my ideas. Everyone involved received copies of whichever pictures they wanted from the sessions.
Has your work dealt with systems of detention in the past?
No, my work is about systems of power, photography being very much implicated in that, in the recording and filing of people. So the prison system is always implicated in that, as are all currents of capitalist power.
What’s next?
I’m just completing a book about Comings & Goings and another body of work following the traces of an age old ritual lingering in the English festivity of Bonfire Night.
BIO
Casey Orr (b.1968) is originally from Pennsylvania. She has lived in England for 14 years working as a freelance photographer and Senior Lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University.Clients include Diva Magazine, Channel 4, EMI Records, Universal Records and Sports Council England. Orr has exhibited at the University of The Arts, Philadelphia, Pa. and Jen Bekman Gallery in New York. She is the recipient of an Arts Council England grant.
Read more about Orr’s exhibition at HMP Leeds in Armley at the Guardian.
“It was surprising for Norfolk to discover that the infrastructure of the internet age is as imposing, ugly and ‘real’ as the cotton mills, mines and factories of Victorian Manchester. Like pulling back the the curtain to find that the Wizard of Oz is actually a little old man, the cloud is no more than giant buildings full of computers, air conditioning units and diesel back up generators; there’s nothing fluffy or vaporous about it.” (Here)
It was either Beierle or Keijser (one of the Mrs. Deane halflings) who emailed and pointed out Simon Menner‘s photographic series Objects – 2010.
FAKE HEAD. Pillow, hat, paper, piece of Tetra Pak, hairs from a broom. @ Simon Menner
Typology is a trendy term that gets banded about easily these day but I have no better term for the straight photography of objects as these. Menner is the latest photographer in an ever-increasing line of prison tool and prison weapon typologists.
In 2005, Marc Steinmetz photographed the manufactured items of Santa Fu, Celle, Wolfenbuttel and Ludwigsburg prisons in Germany. (Featured on PP, July 2009)
Brett Yasko produced the independent book Shiv that features eleven prisoner-made weapons from the collection of Chris Kasabach and Vanessa Sica. The shivs were confiscated in the 1980s at Rahway – now known as East Jersey State Prison. Yasko’s photographs were presented in Design Observer’s feature Art of the Shiv.
Prior to 2008, Toño Vega Macotela was visiting Santa Martha Acatitla Prison, Mexico regularly and his photographs were showcased by Toxicocultura recently (via James).
Cooking Grill No.2 © Toño Vega Macotela
Pages of Brett Yasko's book 'Shiv'. © Brett Yasko
Multibladed Shiv. Image © Brett Yasko
Radio Receiver within Encyclopedia. © Marc Steinmetz, 2002
RADIO. Book, electronics (the title of the book translates “The Reputable Merchant”) © Simon Menner
The usual commentary for these types of typology is to admire the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the inmate. Notably, all four photographers have given “backstories” or contexts for the production and/or confiscation of the objects they’ve photographed. For example, Menner explains, “The objects presented here have all been seized in prison cells of the Berlin Tegel prison.” Menner also thanks the staff for allowing access. These extra details are essential if we are to avoid wonder and mere image-consumption.
These typological studies run the risk of serving politiicised positions; of becoming metaphors for human creativity or resistance.
(Worse still, the item and/or photograph is reduced to an objet d’Art.)
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THINGS
Menner himself is concerned with how images and stories may or may not attach themselves, “What fascinates me here is the very old question of how much of the final object is already “inscribed” in its parts, even before its creation. And by asking this question I also ask a basic question on the nature of images. How much of a story is visible in the images, even before the story itself is unveiled?”
So what do you first think or ask when viewing these images? For me, I want to learn about the institutions, penology and prevailing criminal justice culture in which these inmates functioned:
With regard Yasko’s work – Why were so many shivs made at Rahway? And what led to two collectors acquiring them? With regard Menner and Steinmetz, what uses were dummy pistols and mobile phones put to inside those German prisons?
Fine art representations of these objects mustn’t be the end product in their object biographies. Narratives in the “Social Life of Things” do not end but morph.
The photographs of Yasko, Steinmetz, Macoleta and Menner impose new readings and establish new jumping off points for inquiry.
Device to hide a mobile phone. © Simon Menner
DUMMY PISTOL from blackened cardboard; found on June 23, 1988, in an inmate’s cell in Stammheim prison, Germany, after a fellow prisoner tipped off the jailers. The dummy was hidden in an empty milk pack and was most probably intended to be used for taking hostages in an escape attempt. @ Marc Steinmetz
Prison Photography 