Juvies
Photographer Ara Oshagan has a photography series she calls “Juvies.” She documents high-risk juvenile offenders who are being charged as adults in the state of California.
More of Oshagan’s photography can be viewed on her website.
Herman Krieger Photo Essay
Photographer Herman Krieger does terrific black and white photography of prisons all around the country. Krieger’s photos betray a slight sense of irony and sarcasm. Here are a view samples and you can check out the whole essay here.
Death Penalty Photography Project
Scott Langley, photojournalist and human rights activist, put together a series of photographs over eight years that he called the “Death Penalty Photography Documentary Project.” Here are a couple images below. Check out the website
for more galleries.
Masumi Hayashi
Masumi Hayashi was born at Gila River Relocation camp in Arizona, a Japanese interment camp in 1945. Throughout her career she created composite 360 degree photographs of 10 Japanese internment camps on American soil.
Prison Photography Workshop
Photographer Mikhael Subotzky ran photography workshops for prisoners in South Africa. The results are incredible.
See more of the prisoners’ work here.
Occupation of Alcatraz
Just over 40 years ago in November 1969, Indians of All Tribes (IAT) began an occupation of Alcatraz that lasted 19 months. According to the Native Americans occupying the land, all abandoned or unused federal lands was to be given back to the Native people from whom it was originally taken with accordance of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the US and the Sioux. Due to lack of electricity, water, and food, the population on the island dwindled and the remaining occupants were forcibly removed by the US government.
Photographer, Ilka Hartmann, photographically documented the occupation and is currently displaying slides and lectures on the events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the occupation.
Read an interview with Ilka Hartmann HERE.
Served Out – Aging and Dying Behind Bars
Tim Gruber’s series, Served Out – Aging and Dying Behind Bars, display the lives of elderly prisoners. The photos are an unflinching look of aging and dying in prison.
Prison Beauty Queens
In his 2006 photo essay, Nerv, Fabio Cuttica used photos from a beauty pageant inside of Bogota’s Buen Pastor Prison. The beauty pageant is in honor of the patron saint of prisoners, Virgin Mercedes.
Various other photographs of prison beauty pageants can be seen on a Russian website here, however it is unclear if some of these are staged or photojournalism.
Widelux View on Prison
The New York Times blog has an article about academic-turned-photographer, Bruce Jackson. In the 70’s, as a fellow at Harvard, Jackson traveled to the Arkansas Department of Corrections to follow Terrell Don Hutton, the commissioner set to reform the Arkansas institution. However, Jackson found that the photos he was taking to accompany his essay were becoming more compelling to him. Jackson used a Widelux camera, a swing-lens panoramic camera developed in Japan, giving his prison photos a wider and more abstract view.
Favorite Places
The photographs in Jürgen Chill’s Zellen series present an overhead view of prison cells, neatly organized by the prisoners themselves. In 2007, Jürgen Chill’s Zellen series won him the European Architectural Photography Prize in the “Favorite Places” category.
“A person’s favourite place is a place which can be chosen at will. The person’s freedom is presupposed. Freedom, however, is not granted to all. Those that do not have it must adjust to whatever opportunities exist and strive to create their own place.”
-Jürgen Chill
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