Donovan Wylie 

This is another photographer and work recommended by my CS tutor, in keeping with my interest in identity, and its removal by structures in the penal code in the UK .

What I appreciated most from this work is the consistent approach to presentation.  The palette is uniform, almost to the point of being a mesmerising monochrome.  Was I seeing the same image many times over?  No.  The differences, being almost imperceptible, are disorientating: I found myself having to look closely at the images to see how they were different.​​

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In Louise Purbrick's essay 'The Architecture of Containment' in the Maze books, I found the following points of interest:

"Repetition is a feature of control systems.  The duplication of physical structures (walls, cells, blocks) produces a predictable environment allowing security to be planned out and then constantly repeated.  The H-blocks are distinguished by the numbers one to eight; otherwise they are the same remorselessly functional structures.'(p4).  Of course, this is not the only feature of the control and security systems in place: how a prison is governed also has an effect on its security.

In looking at public, state or private institutions like prisons, hospitals, schools and police stations, this repetition and duplication is very evident and, when you consider that control systems in such institutions is one of their mainstays, expected.  I did not, however, expect it to be so evident in hotels where I had thought that there was not the same need to control but where security is important.  Other factors must therefore be determining that repetition.

There is the need to construct those institutions as economically as possible.  Repetition, therefore, is important: 'repeating rectangular cell-units was evident in England in the 1970s.  Work began on Channings Wood in Devon in 1972, on Deerbolt, County Durham in 1973, and Featherstone in Staffordshire opened in 1976, the same year as the H-blocks." (1:p 11)

The design of the pre-fabricated low-rise cubic structures made up into H-block groups or clusters of cells creating smaller units of prisoners had been constructed some twenty years earlier in the USA in the rebuilding of the notorious State Penitentiary at Angola.  The new prison design was praised by the architectural press for its economical design.  In the 1961 issue of The British Journal of Criminology it was stressed how the prefabrication kept costs per inmate to 'an extremely low figure'.(1:p.11)

One of the advantages of the H-block system was that it reduced the density of the concentration of prisoners as seen in 19th C jails which follows the courtyard, radial structure as seen in the museum of Bodmin jail.  There was an attempt in the 20th C. to mimic a campus style prison structure which also recreated a more human scale environment and, as a result, an easier way to control: a divide and rule strategy.

The tone of the essay reveals a frustration that the author has with the political structures and rationales of the British authorities, which refused to allow that there was a difference between political and criminal prisoners.   The Maze was exclusively for political prisoners, both loyalists and republicans.  Prison rules regarding discipline offences were enforced and  republican prisoners stated that they  were enforced 'with brutality' and that their reaction was to withdraw any co-operation. (p16)   A 1978 report by Archbishop Tomas O'Fiaich after he had visited the Maze is quite revealing of the conditions in the cells he saw:

"The stench and filth in some cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls, was almost unbearable.  In two of themI was unable to speak for fear of vomiting.  the prisoners' cells are without beds, chairs or tables.  They sleep on mattresses on the floor and in some cases I noticed that these are quite wet.  they have no covering except for a towel or blanket, no books, newspapers or reading material except the Bible (even religious magazines have been banned since my last visit); no pens or writing material, no TV or radio, no hobbies or handicrafts, no exercise or recreation.  they are locked in their cells for almost the whole of everyday and some of them have been in this condition for more than a year and a half." (1:pp 16-17)

The images presented by Wylie in  Maze 1 reflects none of that.  He took them after the whole philosophical and concrete realities had run their course.   There is a certain peace around the Inertias, the Steriles and the Roads.  In his description, Wylie states: "If you walk from the perimeter wall towards the centre of the prison, as if breaking into the prison from the outside, it becomes clear how inertias lead to sterile, and sterile lead to roads that lead to the blocks.  The pattern of such a journey is one of constant, relentless repetition on a vast scale.  This  sense of repetition is intensified once inside the block ." (The Maze 1 introduction)  Images of the made-up beds in the cells,  with the curtains on the windows and  their concrete bars reducing what could be seen at ground level, restore a human peace to the tumultuous events which led to the closure of that structure of control and isolation.

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The Panorama programme recently revealed the lawlessness in HMP Northumberland.  What annoyed me most about that programme was its bias.  Because the recent press coverage of prisons in the UK has painted a uniformly black image of their state of affairs, it would have been good to have seen, even for a short while, a prison in which this was not the case, like HMP Dartmoor, for example, which, according to my sources, rarely has violent eruptions. But no, we were given more of the same violence and non-conformity.  It begs the question :in what way do the prisoners benefit from being there?

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My screen grab of the iPlayer version of the recent Panorama undercover report on HMP Northumberland.

Ironically, the cleaned-up system was being dismantled in Maze 11, separating the concrete from its re-inforcing metal rods; collecting the wire fences; everything stripped down to its bare essentials.    "Layer after layer of fencing was folded and piled neatly, then delicately carried away.  The crushing machine, 'the muncher' (designed to the specifications of the head of a tyrannosaurus rex), gnawed through the internal walls and prison cells." (Epilogue to Maze 11).  The reverence and care which seemed so alien to the establishment when it was inhabited, is overpoweringly present in these images of returning dust to dust, making certain that no trace of suffering and control is left anywhere.   Nature is not allowed to take over this bastion of control and isolation as it has done in so many prisons elsewhere.  Wylie's concluding sentences explain how he felt about the whole demolition: "As each layer fell one had the sense of getting closer to something, and the falling of each layer became, for me, a moment to contemplate why all of this happened.  But the further one penetrated, the less seemed to be revealed, as if there were no answers at all." (Maze 11 epilogue.)

The other extreme is the work, undertaken over 10 years, by Valerio Bispuri who recorded his experiences in 74 prisons throughout  Latin America including Lurigrancho in Lima, Peru, which holds ten thousand inmates: a city within a city.   Bispuri maintains that his work is not about prisons but about lost freedom and lack of choice.  His images are gritty, black and white and at times, look as though they were taken on-the-run.   Their cohesion conveys the impression that it does not matter where the images were taken, the circumstances are all the same.

He states " I have always believed that photography's difficulty, but also its power, lies in the ability to balance your own emotions with reality.  And only once you have succeeded in calibrating your own profound emotions in a real concept without one prevailing over the other it is possible to tell a story.  Only at the moment in which I have managed to be in contact with what I am feeling I do (sic) take the shot.'(P. 12)

Bispuri's prisons teem with people who are condemned, both guards and prisoners.  He was struck by the low levels of suicides compared to the prisons in Europe or America.  In one of his reportages, he covered the most notorious Pavillion 5 of the Argentine Mendoza prison.  What emerged was 'a massacre, a disgrace, emblem, evidence of inhumanity, not of the prisoners, but of the State instead.' (P. 9)  Following the publications of the images, Pavillion 5 was closed because ' when you recognise yourself in another person, the worst person possible, perhaps you manage to comprehend that his humiliation .'(p. 9)

'Prisons are a reflection of society, a mirror of what is happening in a country, from small dramas to the great social and economic crises.  The prison is a community, a non-place where nevertheless people live each day with precise rhythms and spaces  (p. 11)

Both photographers reference people; both reference the philosophy of control and containment;  both make you feel their presence but in two very different ways.   They both use light effectively to suit their purposes.  My screen grab of the Panorama programme reflects the predominant coverage of the pitiful state of current media reporting in the UK  press, in my opinion.

It is this everyday banality, reflected also in letters to me from a friend in prison,  which interests me.  There is no doubt that violence exists in many prisons on both sides of the Atlantic but the difference in the way it is covered by different photographers is worth investigating.

References:

Bispuri, V.: 2014. Encerrados. Contrasto srl.  Roma.

Wylie, D.: 2016. Maze. Steidl.

Panorama programme on HMP Northumberland.

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