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More than two million people are currently incarcerated in the United States. While the country accounts for 5 percent of the global population, it is home to 25 percent of the world's prison population. How can photography help us understand this vast system, and the lives shaped-and disrupted-by mass incarceration? From a reflection on the origins of the mug shot to stark aerial views of supermax prisons to recent projects focused on everyday life in New York's Riker's Island, Louisiana's Angola Prison, and California's San Quentin Prison, this issue considers the visual record, and human toll, of a national crisis that is often removed from public view. Prison Nation is organized with contributing editor Nicole Fleetwood, author of the forthcoming book, Carceral Aesthetics: Prison Art and Public Culture.
About the author
Nicole R. Fleetwood is the professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University. Her work on art and mass incarceration has been featured at the Aperture Foundation, the Zimmerli Museum of Art, the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and the Cleveland Public Library, and her exhibitions have been praised by the Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice. She is the author of On Racial Icons and of Troubling Vision, which won the Lora Romero Prize from the American Studies Association. Her book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration was published in April 2020.
Summary
How photographs portray the
crisis of incarceration in the US.
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 US, 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? Organized with the scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, an expert on art’s relation to incarceration, the Spring issue of Aperture magazine addresses the unique role photography plays in creating a visual record of a national crisis.
“Prison Nation” will be accompanied by a related exhibition from February 7 through March 7, 2018, as well as a series of six public programs—featuring speakers such as Nigel Poor, Jamel Shabazz, Deborah Luster, Bruce Jackson, Jesse Krimes, Sable Elyse Smith, Joseph Rodriguez, and more—all to take place at Aperture Foundation’s gallery.
