Week 14 – The Black Lives Matter Era
The author discusses the practice of posing for photographs in prison visiting rooms, focusing on her personal experience exchanging photos with her cousin Allen who was incarcerated.
Vernacular studio photographs taken in prison are a significant but often overlooked form of photography, especially among communities heavily impacted by mass incarceration like Black, Latino, Native American, and poor white populations.
These photos serve as important visual and haptic objects of love and belonging structured through the carceral state, counteracting the isolation imposed by imprisonment.
Prison photographs stand in contrast to official carceral images like mugshots, acting as modes of self-representation and "shadow archives" against governmental indexes of criminalized people.
Painted backdrops in prison portraits are a striking feature, often depicting landscapes and scenes of nonconfinement, providing a sense of fantasy and aspiration that contrasts with the reality of incarceration.
While backdrops offer an illusion of being outside prison, they are also monitored by prison staff for gang symbols.
Prison backdrops mark specific visits and highlight the different experiences of time for the incarcerated and their loved ones.
Prison studio photography is a form of "carceral aesthetics," the production of art and visual representation within conditions of unfreedom.
Incarcerated photographers, working under surveillance, negotiate the desires of subjects to document and simultaneously erase signs of carcerality.
These photos document the emotional labor performed to maintain connections across carceral geographies.
Posing for photographs provides a rare opportunity for physical contact and displays of affection between incarcerated individuals and their visitors, as physical intimacy is otherwise strictly regulated.
The photos often reflect normative family structures, with the incarcerated individual sometimes positioned as the central figure.
Maintaining family bonds with incarcerated loved ones often disproportionately falls on women.
Incarcerated men also engage in emotional labor to stay connected with family.
The cost of purchasing these photos and the logistics of prison visits add to the burdens faced by families.
Prison studio photos complicate traditional family narratives by documenting dreams deferred, loss, and the impact of criminal stigma.
The circulation of these photos among families creates a personal archive that marks the aging and changes of incarcerated relatives and their families on the outside.
These images serve as a reassurance that the incarcerated loved one is alive and managing, though they cannot fully reveal the realities of daily prison life.
The author's family's collection highlights the personal and widespread impact of carcerality.
Even after release, these photographs hold significant meaning, becoming part of the formerly incarcerated individual's way of reconnecting with their past and family.
The reappearance of a pre-incarceration family photo within the prison system illustrates the unexpected journeys and meanings these images can take on.
Ultimately, vernacular prison photos serve to complicate criminal records and assert the value and belonging of incarcerated individuals within their family networks.