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Dave Adler | aperture Magazine | aperture foundation | PRISON “ESCAPIST PHOTOGRAPHS”
Image by The New Insiders | Dave Adler
Photographs of prisoners by prisoners, for prisoners, featuring prisoner created painted photography backdrops. The largest unseen 'art system' subculture in the United States.
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Photos: Dave Adler Archive.
Dave Adler | aperture Magazine | aperture foundation | PRISON “ESCAPIST PHOTOGRAPHS”
All over the United States, prison inmates are making photographic portraits of other inmates, posed against painted backdrops—also made by inmates—featuring fantasy scenes of life outside the prison walls. The practice is thus a collaboration by, for, and about prisoners. While some states and wardens discourage such photographs (perhaps to be tougher on the inmates), others encourage them as a peaceful means of self-expression. Though these photographs are scarcely known in what the prisoners call the “free world,” the system is national in scope. There are more than two million people incarcerated in the United States, and virtually every major penitentiary—both state and federal—has its own painted backdrop created by inmates for this use.
The backdrops typically consist of a large painting on canvas, although some are painted directly on cinderblock walls (a few of these are particularly delicate, adding to the sense of tension in the images). Natural themes are common—beaches, waterfalls, rainbows—as are city skylines. There are regional touches: Western motifs, Mexican murals, even elements of Colonial New England. Many are abstract: wardens review every backdrop for signs of gang symbols, and abstract paintings are seen as more likely to be “clean.”
The inmates have a variety of objectives with these images: to entertain; to pretend to be somewhere else; to escape their incarceration, at least visually. The portraits are often sent to friends and relatives—in an environment without email access, this is a favored mode of making contact with the outside world. But while the idea may be to present a pretty or lighthearted picture, in reality the photographs often convey exactly the opposite sense. The portraits and backdrops defy the expectations of a non-prison audience, and there is a complete lack of sensationalism in the images: these are not the angry, dangerous hoods we know from rap music and the entertainment industry. Here the inmates are smiling self-consciously, or nearly affectless.
I refer to this photography subculture as “The Age of Innocence.” The portraits and backdrops are visually innocent, and the letters I receive from prisoners often (though not always) contain protestations of innocence, about long-forgotten and poorly investigated crimes. I have been documenting this work for several years now, together with an inmates’-rights activist. What we have discovered is that prisoners, despite the direness of their situation, have been able to create a kind of art system for themselves, with its own processes and institutions. And for them, everyone of these photographs is charged with meanings that would be impossible in portraits from the “free world.”
