Photo exhibit offers look into the lives of prisoners
Transcription
Photo exhibit offers look into the lives of prisoners
Subscriber Services | | Home | News | Sports | Entertainment | Business | Food | Lifestyle | Health | Marketplace Collections • Graterford Photo exhibit offers look into the lives of prisoners 3 Like 1 0 @ Tweet We Recommend Graterford Will Hire 191 Guards May 3, 1990 Work underway to build Graterford Prison replacement June 2, 2013 Ruthless killer Robert 'Nudie' Mims dies in prison July 12, 2012 In Graterford for life, he runs a path of self-improvement May 5, 2001 Find More Stories About Graterford Curator Pete Brook stands near Bob Gumpert's photographs of inmates on display in the "Prison Obscura" exhibit at the Haverford College Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College. (DAVID M WARREN / Staff Photographer) By Kathy Boccella, Inquirer Staff Writer POSTED: February 02, 2014 Bob Gumpert tried for years to get into jail. But it's hard if you don't commit a crime and you want to bring a camera and recorder with you. GALLERY: Kristen Wilkins created portraits of women prisoners… "They don't like photographers to come in, especially those who come in and say, 'I just want you to let me in and not have any editorial control over what I'm doing,' " said the San Franciscobased photographer. After years of documenting the lives of detectives, prosecutors, and police, Gumpert persuaded a local sheriff to open the jails to him and his camera. The result is a series of powerful portraits of inmates included in a new exhibit at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery called "Prison Obscura." The exhibit takes its name from one of the earliest forms of 19thcentury photography camera obscura in which a dark, shadowy image is projected onto a screen. The resulting view is upside down and inverted a perfect metaphor, in the opinion of the exhibit's curator, Pete Brook, for the distorted view too many Americans have of the skyrocketing number of inmates and what he calls the prisonindustrial complex. Brook, 33, a writer who now lives in Portland, Ore., developed a fascination with prison photography after leaving England eight years ago to write his master's thesis on California's San Quentin, the oldest operating prison on the West Coast. "I wanted to look at a museum; it happened to be a prison museum," he said in an interview at the gallery, where the show runs through March 7. By chronicling the experience of some of the more than two million U.S. inmates, Brook says his ambition with "Prison Obscura" is to bring citizens facetoface with these images and to contemplate how prison proliferation has changed America. He had a lot of ground to explore. According to the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank, Pennsylvania's prison population has increased by 500 percent since 1980, to roughly 50,000 inmates, and the state lacks enough beds even after building 18 new prisons. Nationally, the U.S. incarceration rate is the highest in the world. With 5 percent of the population, America has 25 percent of the inmates. The exhibit shows satellite pictures of the nation's more than 5,000 locked facilities, looking starkly similar with clusters of pods and units. Most of the photographers tried to humanize their subjects. A mural of photos and writings from men at Graterford the state's largest maximum security prison involved in the Restorative Justice Project with Haverford staff and students "gives voice to the guys who don't have a lot of opportunities to represent their perspective," said Kristin Lindgren, director of Haverford Writing Center, who oversees the program. With 2.3 million inmates on a given day, the photos of smiling inmates in front of Christmas trees, mountains, the Statue of Liberty, or medieval castles make up their own genre of American photography. In contrast, photos from a California classaction lawsuit claiming overcrowding and inadequate physical and mental health services show men stacked in triple bunks in gymnasiums, in cages used for mental health treatment, and other grim slices of prison life. "If we're going to talk about images that change people's lives," said Brook, "then these crappy, lowresolution photos are those." [email protected] 6103138232 @kathyboccella × Comments for this thread are now closed. 0 Comments Philly.com Login Sort by Best Share Favorite Be the first to comment. WHAT'S THIS? 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