Friday 22 October 2010

Stephen Tourlentes.

Image copyright Stephen Tourlentes

From Stephen's statement about his project 'OF LENGTH AND MEASURES: Prison and the American landscape'
"Over the last several years I have been photographing the institution of incarceration in American. The presence and location of these institutions of exile paradoxically reflect back upon the society that builds them. Prisons are highly complex systems designed to contain, and punish the burgeoning population presently incarcerated in the United States. Since 1980 the number of prisons in the U.S. has quadrupled. A 2008 report from the Pew Center on the States reports census totals for the American prison system at over 2.3 million incarcerated in state and federal systems. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. More than one in 100 adults in the US is in prison or jail" CONTINUED

found via Prison photography including an interview by Pete HERE. So it got me thinking I've not really seen much British prison photography. I know about Donovan Wylie's MAZE work, and I've seen portrait work done in association with prisoners/education departments, but for instance I've never seen landscape work done about them. We've 140 of them in Britain, in all kinds of environments so you think someone would have had a stab. Sorry that's a bad choice of words......

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mark

Thanks for the link. Your suspicions are right; there is a lot more prison photography made in America. Here's three examples from the UK:

Joshua Bilton - http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/ectopia-joshua-biltons-off-key-uk-prisons/

Casey Orr - http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/walls-penetrated-by-ideas-by-art-visiting-room-family-portraits-by-casey-orr/

Edmund Clark - http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/still-life-killing-time-by-edmund-clark/

mark page said...

Thanks Pete. I was aware of Edmund Clarks work, and I will check out the others. I am really suprised though that more work is not made about. The longer I study photography the more I realise that when people say "everything has been photographed already" they are talking toss. Hope alls well with you and yours,
Cheers Mark.