Suffering as entertainment
The work in this assignment developed as a result of correspondence I had with a prisoner and my subsequent research on the themes of prisons and prisoners. The resultant documentary images are my personal response to what I have seen, felt, read and watched, and how my mind and my emotions have reacted to those stimuli. There is no claim to objectivity.
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Response 1: Biased reporting colours the vision of people of all ages vis-à-vis prisons and prisoners
Public attitudes tend towards a binary 'us' and 'them' dichotomy. Yet, how can we see who is 'us normals' as described by sociologist Erving Goffman in his book Stigma, and who is 'them'?
According to televised reporting on the main TV channels all prisons are riotous and all prisoners high on drugs.
In this section, I have let technology take over and the outcome satisfies poststructuralist Michel Foucault's heterotopia, that place of 'otherness'( The explanation of heterotopia taken from my CS A 2:“Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place … the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison,” As found here.).
We are always made aware of the increasing number of prisons being built. Below is a Youtube link to a short film on how prisons have changed over the last 210 years in England. There is a sound recording of me reading an extract from one of the letters I received from my friend in prison in February, 2016.
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The video is here.
This final section represents my poststructuralist photography in that the metalanguage of image analysis is missing and the author is decidedly dead. The dissected Polaroids represent in physical terms, the self-analysis I went / am going through after I had visited a friend in prison, when I realised how deep-seated my prejudices were with regard to what prisoners should / do look like.
Reflection on the assignment
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Where I go from here depends , to a large extent, on how the work is received. I plan to use the letters from the ex-prisoner in more ways because I feel that that gives a uniqueness to this project and because they act as a counter-foil to the often biased mis/information we receive in the media. The voice of the reflective prisoner is seldom, if ever, heard.
To take the project further, I would like to try the following ideas: Since attending an OCA meeting led by Doug Burton recently (See my most recent blog) and based on the work of Nathan Coley, I would like to learn about making CGIs and eventually make one using my images of prisons. Having read Ruskin's book The Seven Lamps of Architecture for a previous project, I think The Lamp of Power would be a good concept to apply to the photography of prisons. I would also like to make work based on Ed Ruscha's 34 Parking Lots because prisons from the outside in England are quite uniform.
What went well:
I really enjoyed putting together the series from the Panorama programme on HMP Northumberland because, in my mind, it exemplifies Foucault's heterotopia. The only people in the images who are at peace are the ones on posters. The places too are disintegrating.
I thoroughly enjoyed putting the video together because the contents of the letter extract focus on one aspect of the prisoners experience of the physical prison which the Google Earth images show.
It was fun, following Jenny Wicks's examples of using Polaroids, experimenting with them and getting messy. This also fitted in with that concept of otherness.
What could have gone better:
I would have liked to have been bolder and had gone closer to the people in the streets, but lacked the temerity.
Assessment against the assessment criteria:
Demonstration of technical and visual skills: Good use and awareness of materials; techniques and visual awareness.
Quality of outcome:
Good content and variety of expression. Effective grasp of ideas and communication of visual ideas.
Demonstration of creativity:
Strong creative components with successful outcomes. Consistent personal voice.
Context:
Articulate positioning of the material in its theoretical, social and historical context.