Taryn Simon’s series The Innocents documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates the role of photography in that process.  All the subjects in The Innocents are ex-inmates who were exonerated through DNA testing and then released after serving time.  To create her images, Simon “photographed each innocent person at a site that come to assume particular significance following his wrongful conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the alibi location, or the scene of the crime.”

Taryn Simon is an American fine art photographer.  Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, CNN, BBC, Frontline and NPR.

Click here to purchase her book of portraits The Innocents on Amazon.

To learn more about Taryn Simon, visit her website at www.tarynsimon.com ]]> http://gabrielcity.com/photography/taryn-simon-the-innocents.html/feed 0 http://gabrielcity.com/photography/juvies.html http://gabrielcity.com/photography/juvies.html#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:30:53 +0000 hcdmedia http://gabrielcity.com/?p=2872 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.

for more galleries.

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.

See more of the prisoners’ work here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Full article here.