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The War On Drugs has lasted more than 45 years and cost over $1 trillion dollars. Everyone from Rolling Stone to the Cato Institute to the Obama White House has concluded it a failure. The root of the failure is this: A nation cannot incarcerate, punish and brutalize people out of their already traumatic lives. Drug use and abuse is not solely a criminal matter; it is mostly a public health issue. People addicted to substances need treatment not cages.
The Trump Administration is cheering on its bipartisan First Step Act (and ignoring that the promised $75million for its rollout is actually only $14million the latest proposed federal budget) but the act focuses mostly on prison reform and not sentencing reform. Sure, improved conditions, better reentry support, early compassionate release and access to feminine hygiene products are all very important, but what about stemming the number of people being sent to federal prison? (Note: The First Step Act applies only to federal prisons which house only 10% of U.S. prisoners.) The Trump administration, especially during Jeff Sessions’ leadership of the Justice Department, has been obsessed with law and order instructing police forces and prosecutors to bring the full weight of the law upon people arrested for drug offenses in particular.
In this context, the Beyond Addiction: Reframing Recovery photography exhibition, curated by Graham MacIndoe and Susan Stellin, comes at the right time. See a host of images and contexts at the dedicated website Reframing Recovery. Instead of prisons, the show focuses on “the ways people have rebuilt their lives: reconnecting with their families, finding rewarding work, developing meaningful relationships with partners, peers, and others who offer support,” say Stellin and MacIndoe.
There are approximately 23 million people in the U.S. who have successfully resolved a problem with drugs or alcohol, but do we see their collapse more than their rise? Do we see their struggles more than their triumphs? I’d say the focus too often tends to be on the suffering. This exhibition shines a light on living, not just on a time of life affected by drugs. This exhibition shines a light not on life’s dark moments but on all the light and comparative lightness that former users create for themselves.
Stellin and MacIndoe also recognize the contributions of treatment providers and harm reduction services.
“Recovery is rarely a solo journey and it usually involves setbacks and hurdles, but the more we talk about it, share ideas, and embrace different paths, the more people will find their way,” they say.
It’s a large exhibition. It’s a varied exhibition. It’s optimistic. Stellin, MacIndoe and the artists are part of “a growing movement working to offer examples of success and hope to those still struggling with addiction” and, in that sense, it’s an important exhibition.
ARTISTS
Many of the contributing artists have personal experience with addiction and recovery, while others have worked closely with the people whose stories they documented. Artists include Nina Berman, Allan Clear, John Donadeo, Yannick Fornacciari, Tony Fouhse, Paul Gorman, John Linder, Luceo, Josh Meltzer, Jackie Neale and Neil Sneddon.
Nina Berman: An autobiography of Miss Wish. A multi-dimensional collaborative work focusing on the story of one woman and the intersection of sexual trauma, mental illness, addiction, and recovery.
Allan Clear: Lower East Side Needle Exchange. Photos of people, events, activism, and art from this community center at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.
John Donadeo: Family Ties. Portraits of John’s extended family and friends exploring the socioeconomic and familial factors that impact addiction and recovery.
Yannick Fornacciari: Heroin Days. Images and text juxtaposing Yannick’s first day on methadone with how he felt after a year of treatment.
Tony Fouhse: Live Through This. Photos of a young woman Tony met who asked for help getting into a rehab program, which enabled her to escape life on the street.
Paul Gorman: Rip and Run. Spoken word pieces and images commenting on Paul’s past drug use and his life now in recovery.
John Linder: Art Therapy. Artwork John created in a program that helps participants use art as part of a therapeutic process to address drug and alcohol problems.
Luceo: Harm Reductionists. Photos of supporters of the harm reduction movement paired with handwritten responses to question prompts.
Graham MacIndoe: Thank You for Sharing. Instagram and Facebook posts reflecting on Graham’s addiction, incarceration, and recovery, which have inspired others to share their experiences as well.
Graham MacIndoe and Susan Stellin: Re-Entry & Recovery. Portraits and interviews with people navigating life after addiction and incarceration, from a larger series documenting stories of recovery.
Josh Meltzer: Dopesick—Agents of Change. Portraits of treatment providers, healthcare workers, activists, and counselors shot for Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, by Beth Macy.
Jackie Neale: Common Ground Tacony. A cyanotype portrait banner of Richard, who tends to a garden in the Tacony neighborhood of North Philadelphia as part of his recovery from addiction.
Neil Sneddon: Developing Recovery. Photos taken by clients Neil asked to document the people, places, and things they identified as meaningful for their recovery.
BIOS
Beyond Addiction: Reframing Recovery is curated by Graham MacIndoe and Susan Stellin. MacIndoe is a photographer and assistant professor at Parsons. Stellin, reporter and adjunct professor in the Journalism + Design department at The New School, recently completed a masters in public health at Columbia University. They have collaborated on various projects combining interviews and photography, including exhibitions, talks, and a memoir documenting Graham’s addiction, incarceration, and recovery.
DETAILS
See a host of images and contexts at the dedicated website Reframing Recovery.
Location: Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons School of Design, The New School 66 Fifth Ave. @ 13th St., New York City
Dates: April 6-21, 2019
Gallery hours: Open daily 12:00–6:00 p.m. and Thurs. until 8:00 p.m.
Opening reception and panel discussion: Tues. April 9
5:30 – 6:30 p.m. reception and exhibition viewing
6:30 – 8:00 p.m. panel discussion
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UPDATE: You can get stickers these ways
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SUBTLE, VIOLENT OMISSIONS
The ability to ignore the human rights abuse that is mass incarceration is built upon millions of small omissions, denials, and blind eyes turned. A group of students and faculty from Parsons The New School are pointing out to fellow New Yorkers one such omission.
Rikers Island, New York city’s main lock-up, is an institution beset by problems–including but not limited to environmental hazards, beatings by guards, juvenile solitary, predation, inadequate healthcare, suicide, abominable pre-trial conditions and more. On any given day it holds. Consensus is building that it is a jail that cannot be reformed and must be closed.
Ignominiously, Rikers Island jail is iconic. In a strange and depressing way, it represents NYC. Other icons for the Big Apple invariably include other structures: Empire State Building, The New York Public Library, Rockefeller Building, Statue of Liberty, The Metropolitan Museum.
The system and graphics that connect NYC’s important sites and buildings is the MTA subway map. Again, no less iconic. The subway map is ubiquitous; it is a powerful dictate of information. The subway map shapes knowledge.
Estefanía Acosta de la Peña, Laura Sánchez, and Misha Volf, graduate students at The New School, and creators of #SeeRikers, write:
The MTA and Rikers Island have a complicated relationship. Over the years the massive jailing complex has fallen on and off the subway map. An erratic absence, today Rikers Island is labeled on station maps but not inside trains, on digital versions but not in digital kiosks. #SeeRikers stickers are a simple way to acknowledge this erasure.
Whether an accidental oversight or an intentional omission – we believe it’s important to recognize a place that confines nearly 10,000 people each day and effects the lives of many more New Yorkers. So as you make your way across the city – on your morning commute or evening transfer – please help us put Rikers back on the map.
STICK RIKERS BACK ON THE MAP
You, me, anyone can be part of a rapid, insurgent and widespread correction. Acosta de la Peña, Sánchez and Volf have developed a sticker that riffs on the MTA “You Are Here” arrow. The sticker de-centers the map.
“Whereas the MTA’s label serves as an individual way-finding tool, ours signals a collective void,” say Acosta de la Peña, Sánchez and Volf.
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FEEL THE BERN
Stickers will be passed out during the Bernie Sanders Rally at Washington Square Park on Wednesday, April 13th
Stickers will be handed out at the #CLOSErikers rally at City Hall.
THREE WAYS TO GET STICKERS
1. If you are a New York organization working on criminal justice reform email info[at]itsamademademademadeworld[dot]com and stickers can be delivered.
2. If you are an individual, visit the States of Incarceration Exhibition at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street, New York, NY) now through April 24th.
3. DIY. Use the #SeeRikers Print Files and print on clear sticker paper.
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Follow #SeeRikers on Twitter.
If you’re in NYC, get yourself to lower Manhattan tomorrow evening.
Josh Begley is a data artist and web developer, well known for creating an iPhone app to track every reported U.S. drone strike.
In his artist talk ‘Visualizing Carceral Space’, Begley will discuss his projects Prison Map and Dronestream (a.k.a MetaData).
Begley will speak from 6:00 to 7:30 pm, on Thursday March 12th, at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 2 W13th Street in the ground-floor Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery.
The talk is offered as part of the programming for Prison Obscura showing at Parsons which features an expanded, custom-made version of Prison Map.
Josh Begley‘s work has appeared in Wired, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He currently works at The Intercept doing incredible things like this.
Follow Josh on Twitter at @joshbegley and on @dronestream.
Prison Obscura is currently at the mid-point of its New York showing at Parsons The New School of Design. At this moment, I wanted to share with you a few installation shots made by Marc Tatti for Parsons.
I also took the opportunity to re-issue the Prison Obscura catalogue essay (originally published by Haverford College) on Medium. Read Can Photographs of Prisons Improve the Lives of Prisoners?
I have hi-res images of all artworks and installation shots. Should you need any, drop me a line.
Enjoy the weekend!
All images: Marc Tatti.
UPDATE: WEDS., 25TH FEB, 2:50PM. I JUST HEARD FROM PARSONS THAT THE WORKSHOP IS FULL. THAT IS GOOD NEWS FOR MARK AND THE PARTICIPANTS. LESS GOOD FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE GOT THEIR HOPES UP BECAUSE OF THIS POST.
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SPACES ARE STILL AVAILABLE FOR MARK STRANDQUIST’S TALK These Images Won’t Tell You What You Want: Collaborative Photography and Social Justice AT THE SJDC ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27TH AT 6PM.
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Description from prisoner at Richmond County Jail, Virginia, from a workshop by Mark Strandquist.
WINDOWS FROM PRISON
Mark Strandquist will be coordinating a participatory workshop this Saturday, February 28, in New York City. Over the course of the day, artists, activists, lawyers, students, journalists, photographers, corrections officers, formerly incarcerated individuals and others will work together through dialogue to create photographs requested by prisoners in New York state.
Mark and his collaborators who include the Correctional Association of New York, the Young New Yorkers, Exalt Youth and the New York Writers Coalition have already sourced written responses from prisoners to the question:
“If you had a window in your cell, what place from your past would it look out to?”
The workshop is at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, at the Parsons School of Design. Those who gather at SJDC on Saturday will travel in groups to the various locations to make images, which will be sent back to the prisoners.
The workshop is part of the programming for Prison Obscura, a show of prison photography I have curated. Prison Obscura includes Strandquist’s series Some Other Places We Have Missed which was the earliest iteration of his workshops conducted in Richmond Jail, Virginia. Since then, Strandquist has partnered with local reform groups and stakeholders in the prison issue to custom-designed workshops in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia.
The ongoing program of workshops Windows from Prison is designed to open up conversation about the impacts of mass incarceration by using the medium of photography.
Images made during the workshop will be exhibited in the atrium space of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center adjacent to the Prison Obscura exhibit.
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Prison Obscura is made possible with the support of the John B. Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Haverford, PA.
After stints at Haverford College, PA; Scripps, CA; and Rutgers, NJ, my first solo-curated effort Prison Obscura is all grown up and headed to New York.
It’ll be showing at Parsons The New School of Design February 5th – April 17th:
Specifically, it’s at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, located at 2 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011.
On Thursday, February 5th at 5:45 p.m, I’ll be doing a curator’s talk. The opening reception follows 6:30–8:30 p.m. It’d be great to see you there.
Here’s the Parsons blurb:
The works in Prison Obscura vary from aerial views of prison complexes to intimate portraits of incarcerated individuals. Artist Josh Begley and musician Paul Rucker use imaging technology to depict the sheer size of the prison industrial complex, which houses 2.3 million Americans in more than 6000 prisons, jails and detention facilities at a cost of $70 billion per year; Steve Davis led workshops for incarcerated juvenile in Washington State to reveal their daily lives; Kristen S. Wilkins collaborates with female prisoners on portraits with the aim to compete against the mugshots used for both news and entertainment in mainstream media; Robert Gumpert presents a nine-year project pairing portraits and audio recordings of prisoners from San Francisco jails; Mark Strandquist uses imagery to provide a window into the histories, realities and desires of some incarcerated Americans; and Alyse Emdur illuminates moments of self-representations with collected portraits of prisoners and their families taken in prison visiting rooms as well as her own photographs of murals in situ on visiting room walls, and a mural by members of the Restorative Justice and Mural Arts Programs at the State Correctional Institution in Graterford, PA. Also, included are images presented as evidence during the landmark Brown v. Plata case, a class action lawsuit that which went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, where it was ruled that every prisoner in the California State prison system was suffering cruel and unusual punishment due to overcrowded facilities and the failure by the state to provide adequate physical and mental healthcare.
Parsons has scheduled a grip of programming while the show is on the walls:
Mid-day discussion with curator Pete Brook and Tim Raphael, Director, The Center for Migration and the Global City, Rutgers University-Newark.
Wednesday, February 4, 12:00–1:30 p.m.
Co-hosted with the Humanities Action Lab.
These Images Won’t Tell You What You Want: Collaborative Photography and Social Justice.
Friday, February 27, 6:00 p.m.
A talk by Mark Strandquist.
Windows from Prison
Saturday, February 28
A workshop led by Mark Strandquist. More information about participation will be available on the website.
Visualizing Carceral Space
Thursday, March 12, 6:00 p.m.
A talk by Josh Begley.
Please spread the word. Here’s a bunch of images for your use.
PARTNERS
At The New School, Prison Obscura connects to Humanities Action Lab (HAL) Global Dialogues on Incarceration, an interdisciplinary hub that brings together a range of university-wide, national, and global partnerships to foster public engagement on America’s prison system.
Prison Obscura is a traveling exhibition made possible with the support of the John B. Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Haverford, PA.
Prison Photography 