Most prisons and jails across the United States do not allow prisoners to have access to cameras. At a moment when 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S., 3.8 million people are on probation, and 870,000 former prisoners are on parole, how can images tell the story of mass incarceration when the imprisoned don’t have control over their own representation? How can photographs visualize a reality that, for many, remains outside of view?
This month, Aperture magazine releases an issue entitled Prison Nation, addressing the unique role photography plays in creating a visual record of this national crisis. Organized with the scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, this project is accompanied by a related exhibition on view at Aperture Foundation in New York from February 7 through March 7, 2018, as well as a series of five interdisciplinary public programs – featuring speakers such as Nigel Poor, Jamel Shabazz, Deborah Luster, Bruce Jackson, Jesse Krimes, Sable Elyse Smith, Joseph Rodriguez, and more.
The project gathers portfolios by Deborah Luster on a passion play at Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary; Emily Kinni on Texas’s hub for recently released prisoners; Jack Lueders-Booth’s intimate portraits from one of the first women’s facilities in the U.S.; Stephen Tourlentes’s haunting nighttime landscapes of American prisons; Nigel Poor on a previously unseen archive of photographs from California’s infamous San Quentin prison; Joseph Rodriguez on reentry centers in Los Angeles; and Sable Elyse Smith’s multilayered personal narrative of prisons and playgrounds.
All images illustrate how incarceration impacts all of us. “Americans, even those who have never been to a prison or had a relative in prison, need to realize that we are all implicated in a form of governance that uses prison as a solution to many social, economic, and political problems,” Fleetwood notes. Empathy and political awareness are essential to creating systemic change – and both the exhibition and the issue of Aperture magazine may provoke us to see parts of ourselves in the lives of those on the inside.
Prison Nation
February 7 through March 7, 2018
Aperture Foundation
4th Floor, 547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
USA
