Do you remember last year when Olafur Eliasson installed his waterfalls in New York City? Well, 40 years ago Isamu Noguchi did this in Osaka. Just thought you should know.
Michael Shaw has been conscientiously restructuring BagNewsNotes over the past six months or so. Here’s how he describes the rebranded Bag:
• An almost hypnotizing archive featuring hundreds of ways to sort through our over 3000 image posts.
• A dedicated photojournalism section, BagNewsOriginals, steered by long-time BNN contributor, Alan Chin with a powerful lineup showcasing BAG’s distinguished contributor, Nina Berman, fresh off her Whitney Biennial success; World Press and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Suau on the economy; and much, much more.
• A Salon section managed by the talented photographer and multimedia producer, Sandra Roa, formerly of the NYT Lens Blog, mixing audio slideshows and live chats, all focusing on key images of the day. We kick off on Wednesday with an audio slide show featuring Ashley Gilbertson’s look at the bedroom shrines of fallen US soldiers.
• Our mainstay news image analysis by BAG publisher Michael Shaw, with new contributors, including: acclaimed photojournalist Chris Hondros conducting exclusive interviews; leading visual academics Bob Hariman and John Lucaites deconstructing visual culture; and former White House photographer, Stephen Ferry, on media’s pictorial stereotyping of the third world.
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The Bag is all about demystifying (political) imagery and helping people along with visual literacy. Yes, audiences are more savvy, more sophisticated, but there is still a distance to go.
The Bag is the most persistent contributor to this ongoing analysis. The importance of the Bag’s ever critical eye cannot be underestimated in a world that sinks deeper into the swell of images every day.
The new look by designer Naz Hamid of Weightshift is super navigable and I think it is funny (humorous) that the Bag has made use of the same font used by the New York Times’ arts and media blogs.
The font choice is a cheeky nod to the subtle echoes of form and type that run through our daily visual experiences! It’s as if the Bag is testing its own hypothesis from within the permanent elements of its own visual architecture. That, and it doesn’t hurt to have subliminal associations with the Grey Lady!
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MY CONTRIBUTION?
Last year, Shaw contacted me and at the same time as describing Bag’s sweeping changes asked me if I’d come on-board as a contributor.
Writings on US prisons here on Prison Photography will be cross-posted to the Bag in order to bring images and issues of America’s prison industrial complex to a wider audience.
I’ve a got a couple of posts coming up this week so stay alert for those and for all that the Bag offers consequently.
Frank Schershel. Photos licensed for personal non-commercial use only by LIFE
I was made aware of this set of photographs last week (sorry I forget the source!). They’re an interesting document of a bustling metropolis’ prison with an open program of movement, activity and an array of inmates.
The number of visitors and family members involved in many of the images leads me to think of this prison as an institution where people remained until the peculiarities of their situation could be agreed upon and then communicated to ensure release.
The social engagement of inmates with those from outside suggests to me (with an acknowledgement of harsh lockdown-modern-prisons) that the authorities of 1950s Mexico City either weren’t convinced of prisoners guilt, could be convinced otherwise, or simply didn’t map the denial of family-involvement on to the landscape of criminal punishment.
Frank Schershel. Photos licensed for personal non-commercial use only by LIFE
Frank Schershel. Photos licensed for personal non-commercial use only by LIFE
Schershel’s photographs recalled Richard Ross‘ image from Architecture of Authority. Schershel’s images doubled my visual knowledge of Mexican prisons, and so know I find myself in the unacceptable position that Mexican penitentiaries are – in my mind (at least temporarily) – the Palacio de Lecumberri … which means I have to do more research to get away from that inadequate knowledge base.
Palacio de Lecumberri (former prison) Mexico City, Mexico 2006. © Richard Ross
Until Schershel’s photo set, I had thought that Ross’ picture depicted a tower in the centre of a modestly-sized jail, but Schershel’s image puts the tower and rotunda into its larger setting (top left octant).
Frank Schershel. Photos licensed for personal non-commercial use only by LIFE
Charles Moore. (American, born 1931). Martin Luther King, Jr. Arrested. 1958. Gelatin silver print. 8 3/8 x 12 3/16" (21.3 x 31 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Harriette and Noel Levine.
Infrastructure: labor, land, financing, and the general organizational capacity to combine these things in order to make other things, in general, easier to make. While not always public, it is the form of most public wealth.
Prisons are a monumental aspect of the ghastly public infrastructure underlying a chain of people, ideas, places, and practices that produce premature death the way other commodity chains crank-out shoes or cotton or computers.
Why don’t our heads burst into flames at the thought? Why is the prison-industrial complex so hard to see? The many structures that make carceral geographies disappear (which is to say, become ordinary) depend, for their productive capacity, on the infrastructure of feeling.
To affect what lies beneath these structures, wherever it might be in space and time, requires radical revision. By turning what becomes ordinary towards the extraordinary, our expressive (and explanatory) figurative works cause what disappears to be visible, palpable, present here and now.
– Ruth Wilson Gilmore
When I read Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s introduction to Prison Culture, I was struck by the common requisite of feeling to bring about change.
Photography is ever amidst a debate about whether it can bring about change, and I think a lot of that rests on whether photographers are presenting – with the right mix of emotion and political message – images that help, nay compel, the audience to see the disappeared.
This can be a tired notion to those who have toyed with it for years, but one only need to listen to Charles Moore speak about his images to be reminded how powerful photography can be. I cried when Moore described his disgust for violence and the oppression of civil rights.
As Moore believes (and I agree), his images had a profound affect on the people of America, allowing them to see the “disappeared” and see the “ordinary” hatred that welled in the Southern states in the 1960s.
It is my contention that the visual narratives of prisons in the US have still many avenues to explore in order to transform public thought and catalyse public action.
That, partly, is why I write on Prison Photography.
Vernell Crittendon and an inmate talk as they cross the yard at San Quentin. © Darcy Padilla
© Laura Pannack
Laura Pannack is based in the UK and Lydia Panas in the US.
Pannack deals with the awkwardness and the concealed emotions of adolescence, Panas deals with the small gestures between family which may or may not infer awkwardness and concealed emotions.
The bare back, the turned back, the turned head, the caught glimpse and the avoided glance are all enticing props for a charged portrait.
Through their eye contact, both Pannack and Panas’ subjects foolishly ask us questions. Foolish because, let’s be honest, what do we know about childhood or teenage conundrums?
© Lydia Panas
© Laura Pannack
@ Lydia Panas
© Laura Pannack
© Lydia Panas
© Laura Pannack
© Lydia Panas
How often when a teenager does something totally awesome does it get acknowledged? Not often enough?
This is awesome.
"Prison" by Siever Karim, 2005. As part of the Image & Identity Young People’s Conference at the V&A.
Siever’s Statement:
‘My ideas were based on conformity, and the suppression of cultures and personal individuality by being a number, wearing a uniform, being trapped in the cages of the social machine. I created my own police height chart and got my classmates to stand in front of it. I also made digital barcodes to symbolise the gathering of information which can be accessed so easily today.’
Image & Identity Artwork Project, Victoria & Albert Museum, 2006
Alphonse Bertillon was born on April 24th, 1853. I call him “The Godfather of all things Criminally Photographic”.
Bertillon was the French criminologist and anthropologist who created the first system of physical measurements, photography, and record-keeping that police could use to identify recidivist criminals. Before Bertillon, suspects could only be identified through eyewitness accounts and unorganized files of photographs.
In 1883, the Parisian police adopted his anthropometric system, called signaletics or bertillonage. Bertillon identified individuals by measurements of the head and body, shape formations of the ear, eyebrow, mouth, eye, etc., individual markings such as tattoos and scars, and personality characteristics.
The measurements were made into a formula that referred to a single unique individual, and recorded onto cards which also bore a photographic frontal and profile portrait of the suspect – the “mug shot”. The cards were then systematically filed and cross-indexed, so they could be easily retrieved. In 1884, Bertillon used his method to identify 241 multiple offenders, and after this demonstration, bertillonage was adopted by police forces in Great Britain, Europe, and the Americas.
One of Bertillon’s most important contributions to forensics was the systematic use of photography to document crime scenes and evidence. He devised a method of photographing crime scenes with a camera mounted on a high tripod, to document and survey the scene before it was disturbed by investigators. He also developed “metric photography“, which used measured grids to document the dimensions of a particular space and the objects in it.
Anthropometric photography of a convict at his arrival in prison. Basse Normandie. Calvados. Caen. Prison. 1976. Photo: Jean Gaumy / Magnum Photos
Prison Photography 