Literature review

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Brief: Write a 2000 word literature review that identifies, summarises and critically discusses the most relevant texts that currently explore the subject area of your practice in Body of Work.  Try to contrast differing points of view and indicate how you will expand your research into your extended written project.

Suffering as entertainment.

The literature reviewed in this essay has been selected to shed light on suffering as entertainment by considering the following questions which constitute the parameters of this exploration:

• To what extent can poststructuralist philosophy reflect how we make or read images linked to prisons?

• What influences us in how we see prisons and prisoners?

• Can history shed any light on the state of prisons in 21st Century Great Britain?

• How have photographers working in prisons presented their findings?

 

To what extent can poststructuralist philosophy guide us in how we make or read images linked to prisons?

 

Underpinning this analysis are Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist concept of the heterotopia of deviation and his ideas on the application of the power-knowledge nexus in relation to how prisons are governed.

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The term ‘heterotopia’ is derived from the Greek heteros meaning other or different, and topios meaning place.    A heterotopia is a space within a space or a world within a world which simultaneously reflects and disturbs the outside world.  “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,” (1)   In the same article, Foucault maintains that the 20th C is a time in which space, more than time, is the main preoccupation.. Other heterotopian spaces are cemeteries and care homes (heterotopias of crisis).  Foucault derived the idea from his idea of the mirror as utopia since it is “a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there… where I am absent… But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, …  it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.” (1)  Unlike utopias, heterotopias are spaces which exist physically and every culture has them. 

 

The second relevant Foucault principle in relation to prisons is the power-knowledge nexus. His work  “Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison” 1975 which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, has been translated as  “Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison” instead of “Police and punish”, presents his principal ideas on the history of Western prisons as places of torture, punishment and discipline.   He wants people to think about the changes which have occurred and how the penal system has lead to the application of science and technology in the service of subjugation.  He refers to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon idea designed in the late 18th C, as an architectural model (never realised) of a perfect surveillance system in which there was an unequal gaze: the prisoner never saw he was being watched but simply assumed he was. Foucault’s ideas on prison’s shortcomings were criticised by historian Peter Gay because he exaggerates the extent to which those in power want to keep the masses docile and “underestimating factors such as contingency, complexity, the sheer anxiety or stupidity of power holders or their authentic idealism.” (Gay p 616)

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The new go-to philosopher today is Jacques Rancière who sweeps aside all modern and  post-modern philosophies in favour of a concept of equality particularly as it applies to the politics of aesthetics or, what it is permissible to say or to show.(2) Foucault’s heterotopia concerns a real place yet the reality shown in prisons differs from person to person.  This essay will not stray into the space of the infinite polemic of ‘reality in photography’ except to state that, to the Sekulas, the Solomon Godeaus and the Baudrillards in the debate arguing that there is no reality, no truth in photography, there are the Fontcubertas, the Kaels and the Peress who will argue against them, and Rancière who will argue against both stating that ‘new kinds of artworks create new communities and ways for people to relate to one another’. (2).    In its practical application, this analysis will favour the argument of photographer Gilles Peress who states:  “Photography is a tool and a vehicle to understand … my relationship to reality… My primary goal is to make up my own mind as an individual as to what’s out there.”(Linfield p. 236), and that of Rancière regarding the creation of new kinds of artworks.    

 

• What influences us in how we see prisons and prisoners?

  When Guy Debord argued that “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord:4), he could have had in mind  our current  world of hypervisibility in which, through social media,  much is photographed for mass consumption, and yet, film critic Serge Daney claims that “From so much looking we no longer see anything: the excess of seeing leads to blindness from saturation.  … disinformation is achieved by immersing us in an indiscriminate and indigestible glut of information.” (Fontcuberta p.50).  This is supported by Siegfried Kracauer who stated “mass culture creates the homogenous cosmopolitan audience in which everyone has the same response’ (Linfield p.25).   In referring to images as an intoxicating drink, Joan Foncuberta states “Nothing can quench our thirst for images, the soma of postmodernism” (Fontcuberta p.27).  

 

We read press articles, watch televised documentaries, see images of prisons and prisoners, and we cannot escape that ‘blindness from saturation’, that intoxicating drink or that ‘mass culture’ response.  The ‘spectacle’ we face is the same dystopian diet of riots and disorder, and stigmatized and drugged-up human beings for whom the outdated politics and architecture of incarceration management constitute a recipe for recidivism.     

 

If we read letters from prisoners, their poems, their autobiographies, would that influence how we see them?  And if we read about what outside agencies do for them and on their behalf?   If we speak to them?   Would the ‘us’ and ‘them’ separation be assuaged?  

         

Journalist Peter Gould, in his recent BBC article on his correspondence with Ian Brady, wrote, on the death of the prisoner, what had prompted him to write to Brady and his reaction when he received a reply: 

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“Intrigued, I wrote to him and asked him if he was planning to apply for parole.  I did not expect a reply, so the arrival of a letter from Gartree Prison, from prisoner number 605217, came as a shock. As I held it in my hands, unopened, all my memories of the Moors Murders came flooding back. … Merely to mention Brady’s name was enough to make anyone alive in the 1960’s shudder with horror.” (3)

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Gould is clearly apprehensive about starting an exchange of letters with a convicted mass murderer and he was very surprised to read that their correspondence spanned continued over 30 years.  We are privy to what Brady thought of the coverage he was receiving from the media:

"The national media allege I organised a Christmas party for the ward. I organised no such party. I ate nothing whatsoever on Christmas Day. There was a ward barbecue this afternoon, hordes of strangers waiting to gawp at the performing monkey, but I didn't take the stage. Several national newspapers allege I invited the Yorkshire Ripper, who is even not in this hospital but Broadmoor. A newspaper falsely states that I go on trips outside. I am in my cell night and day and go nowhere at all."  (3)

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Gould admitted that the letters revealed a man who was, as part of his strategy in coping with his loss of freedom, battling against the authorities.  The letters revealed a man who “did not fit the popular stereotype of the sub-human monster, an image that most of us recognise instantly from crime thrillers on TV, and find strangely reassuring.’ (3)  It is not, sadly, only from fiction that we form images of the ‘sub-human monster’. 

 

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                                Figure 1: Used with kind permission of the author Peter Gould

In February this year, a BBC Panorama programme featured undercover footage of life in HMP Northumberland where drugs are rife and control of the prisoners appears to be non-existent.    The film which was relayed on iPlayer, reflect what Wolfgang Tillmans refers to as ‘relinquishing authorship to the machine.’ (Dercon p.40) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               

                                   Figure 2: Inside HMP Northumberland.  Image: Anna Goodchild

 

‘Relinquishing authorship to the machine’, ironically revealed that vulnerability evidenced in the prisoners’ writings.

 

Francis Galton, Dr Jean-Martin Charcot& Josef Gall have all set precedents at the turn of the 20thC in using available data to further their understanding and knowledge. (Fontcuberta p 62)  Krzysztof Pruszkowski did his best to parody those efforts in 1975 in his work ‘Menopause’ (a pun on the French terms used in the original) with enviable outcomes.(ibid p. 74)

The Open University offers free courses to the first 150 inmates to register.  Out of one such programme has emerged an annual body of poetry written by the prisoners and published in “Insidepoetry.  Poetry from people in prison.”  The following are extracts from a longer poem

“Who’s mad?” by Mark Done – HMP Usk:

I share a cell with Elvis

You know he isn’t dead!

He’s lying on the top bunk

Of my prison bed.

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I shared a cell with Elvis

Though you would call him Dan

He’s left us now and gone away

He died here in the can

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I miss my old friend Elvis

But today a new man came

To share my cell and my TV

John Lennon is his name! (Billington p.63)

 

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 The Angel Tree initiative which sends prisoners’ children presents at Christmas and the Sycamore Tree initiative which delivers educational programmes to prisoners are two branches of the Christian organization Prison Fellowship.

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A recently published autobiography “Inside out” by John Lord, gives us a glimpse of what it is like to be in and out of prison.  Whilst in prison, his partner had told him she was leaving him and, apart from smashing up his cell, he tried to commit suicide but was found and he recovered in hospital.  After his release, “I was bragging to all my friends about what it was like ‘in the big house’ (Strangeways Prison) and for a while I was walking around acting like a gangster.  Obviously, I didn’t mention about trying to commit suicide because I didn’t want to spoil my reputation.” (Lord p. 63)

In her memoir as a prisoner’s wife,  Asha Bandele writes:“In order to survive you must expand not only what you believe, but also how you go about believing it.  You must expand it until you’re nearly like a small child, accepting the implausible, the fantastic.   No one in prison ever thinks they’re really going to take away all of that time from you, all of that life.” (Bandele p. 37)            

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Can history shed any light on the state of prisons in 21st Century Great Britain?

Prisons have existed in one form or another since the Dark Ages.  They have been called dungeons and klinks, but the oldest prison in the UK was at Shepton Mallet built in 1625 as a House of Correction to comply with an act by King James 1 in 1609 stating that every county have such a house.  The numbers of prisons and prisoners have varied over the years, as has the use of the prison buildings.    Prisons have been rebuilt or turned into museums of incarceration made entertaining and interactive to increase their popularity and revenue.  Baudrillard’s simulacrum concept is strongly in evidence all over Great Britain in former dungeons and jails, replicating instruments of the most brutal practices and presenting them in lurid colours to intensify the voyeurs’ experiences.  

 

Research for this essay was carried out on the building of new prisons over the last 210 years.  The outcomes, presented under Apendix 1 reveals that whereas in England the population grew by 44.25milion and there were 86 more prisons, in Scotland the population grew by 3.5milion and there were 2 fewer prisons in 2011 than there were in 1800.  There were three spikes in prison construction in England: in the 1940s when 9 new prisons were built and only 1 closed,  in the 1960s when 17 new prisons were built and none closed and finally, in the  1990s when 18 new prisons were built and 2 closed.  In the 1990s prisons and certain police activities started being run by private companies.  As of January 2017, 14 prisons were run by 3 different private companies.(4)   A big spike in prison closures came in 2013 when 14 prisons were closed.  

 

The Secretary of State for Justice, Liz Truss, stated in an interview in February 2017, that “making deep cuts in the record 85,000 prison population in England and Wales … would put the public at greater risk.  She said that longer prison sentences were the biggest driver of the growth in the last 20 years.” (4)    Only 25% of the prison population is in for VATP (Violence Against The Person) (Allen P.9 ) which means that 75% are not violent which would reduce the prison population by

63,750.   Film maker Wim Wenders, in ‘The Act of Seeing’ states: “The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes.  In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political … And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.” (Levi Strauss p. 1)  The suffering seen in museum prisons, dramatised in the name of education, reinforces the sentiment.

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 Despite the sociologist’s call for : “Small prisons, small groups within small prisons.  Small enough groups to be able to relax discipline and to introduce some democracy.  Small enough to have some rules jointly made and jointly accepted, to encourage responsibility, and to provide a climate in which prison officers can lead and not suppress.”  (Klare p. 93)  21stC prisons get bigger and bigger.  The latest UK prison opened is HMP Berwyn in Wrexham in March 2017, at a cost of £280million and which will hold more than 2,100 prisoners, the largest in Europe and dwarfing HMP Oakwood , near Wolverhampton, with its 1,600 capacity .    

 

How have photographers working in prisons presented their findings?

 The photographers in this study, Edmund Clark, Donovan Wylie, Jenny Wicks and Michal Chelbin , have produced work which, in temperament and style, covers diverse documentary photography practice.  Peter Brook of the online blog Prison Photography, started in 2008, lists 123 photographers of prisons. 

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Donovan Wylie’s Maze (2009) and Edmund Clark’s Control Order House (2012) present their prisons from very different angles yet their work shares an absence of people but for different reasons.  Jenny Wicks’ They are Us and We are Them (2012) and Michal Chelbin’s ‘Young Prisoners’ (2010) in the Ukraine present figurative work, each executed with a very different modus operandi.  All have chosen to use conventional photography, there is no accidental technical mishap or serendipitous mistake in evidence.

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Clark’s Control Order House exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London,  impresses the viewer with the vastness of the project, the subject of which is physically contained in an ordinary house.   The object for the study for Clark was to show that this detention without trial is going on in Britain and that Control Order House is of historic significance.   Clark looks at the extraordinary through the banal and, by doing so, reduces the distance between our perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’.  Although there are no people in the images, the project is about the reality, the current experience of the person whose objects we are all looking at. “the images are ‘unmediated, unedited, uncomposed ‘ to see how we see/visualize space through forms associated with commercial and consumer choice, how we exercise control and choice in our houses and homes.” (8.  P 68).  Clark states: “I like the idea of creating the ultimate entertainment Panopticon.  Where the public can constantly survey people perceived as a threat and can vote how and where they live and behave.” (p. 68)

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 Wylie also produces images of the extraordinary through the mundane. The very subdued, monotone and restricted palette of his landscape belies the tumultuous events concerning the destruction of what could be called the bloodiest part of Anglo-Irish history and the dismantling of the power and control that not only the Maze prison but also the British government exercised over its inmates.   Both authors respond to the internment of suspected terrorists.  Both produce totally different work.  Both reflect the everyday experiences of their subjects.  Both reflect the daily routine imposed on the suspects.  “Reveille was at eight o’clock in the morning, followed by showers, breakfast then a parade.” ( Wylie p 7) 

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CE, the suspect in Clark’s work, had a routine imposed on him consisting of going to check in at the police station at 1 o’clock every afternoon, being indoors by 19.25 to call the tag company and curfew at 20.00hrs.

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It is evident in the work of both Wicks and Chelbin that they relate to their subjects.   Chelbin’s interest stemmed from her research into her own family history.  Many of her forebears were killed during the holocaust in the former Soviet Union and some of those who survived emigrated to the Soviet Union.   “Family pictures for which there were no stories were very mysterious and interesting to me.  I really like looking at those faces and how the portraits were staged.” (9. P10).  She was drawn to photographs of staged portraits and that seems to have informed her practice in the young offenders prisons in the Ukraine.  It took her three years to convince the authorities in the Ukraine to allow her to photograph the young boys in prison.  She states: “The first thing that captures my attention are their eyes.  It’s something about their gaze that begins to tell their story … For me it’s like a self-portrait.  It’s very hard to point the camera at myself …” (9. P 13).

Wicks asks “What's the difference between us and them?”  (10)  She focuses on and subverts the mugshot, challenging the us and them binary options.  She uses Polaroids which she processes to reveal the delicate, sepia film which shows the absence of physical differences, the absence of the mugshot connotations of police records.

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Conclusions

The text I found most illuminating was that written by Joan Fontcuberta because it presents photography and photographic history in a lively, irreverent discourse compared to the traditional texts like those by Levi Strauss and Linfield.  The accessible style evident in Fontcuberta is very similar to that in Tillman's book on his latest exhibition at Tate Modern.

The Foucault texts were challenging but offered a different philosophy which deals with precisely my perspective on prisons being a different place that not many really know about - the people outside see it as a house of monsters while those recently in it have a million different personal takes on what goes on inside.   As places of 'otherness', prisons are constantly in the media because nobody can get an angle on them.

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2251 words excluding quotations.

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Bibliography

 

Allen,G. & Watson, C.(Eds): 2017 UK Prison Population Statistics. Briefing paper Number

                      SN/SG/04334. House of Commons Library.

Bandele,A: 1999. The Prisoner’s Wife. A memoir. New York. Scribner.

Berger,J. 1972.  Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books.

Billington,R.(Ed.) 2011.Insidepoetry. Voices from prison.Volume 3. Bodmin. MPG Books Group.

Debord, G. 1970.  Society of the Spectacle. Black and Red.

Dercon,C. & Sainsbury,H.(Eds):2017.  Wolfgang Tillmans 2017. Tate Publishing

Fontcuberta,J.  2014. Pandora’s Camera. Mack.

Foucault,M. 1975.  Discipline and Punish: The birth of the Prison. New York. Random House.

Gay,P.1995. The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud.  The cultivation of hatred. 

London. Fontana Press.

Klare,H.J.  1960. Anatomy of prison.Pelican Books      

Goffman,E. 1990 Stigma. Penguin Books.

Levi Strauss,D. 2003.  Between the eyes. Aperture.

 

Linfield,S. 2012. The Cruel Radiance. University of Chicago Press.

Lord,J.: 2016. Inside Out. Hachette UK.

 

References:

1.  https://foucault.info/doc/documents/heterotopia/foucault-heterotopia-en-html

2.  http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp

3.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39925965

4.  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/13/liz-truss-rejects-calls-to-cut-sentences-to-reduce-prison-population

5.  https://www.justice.gov.uk/about/hmps/contracted-out

6.  http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/hmp-berwyn-britains-new-   super-12677576

7.  https://prisonphotography.org/2017/02/15/in-britain-the-slavery-next-door-in-conversation-with-amy-romer/

8.  Photoworks: October-April 2012/3.Media as direct action (p104)

9.  Hotshoe Feb – Mar 2013

10.  https://prisonphotography.org/tag/jenny-wicks/

 

 

Apendices

1. Populations in millions correlated to the number of prisons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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From 1801 to 1901

In England the population increased by 21 m, 30 new prisons opened and 11 closed.

In Scotland the population increased by 2.7m, 3 prisons opened and 4 closed.

 

From 1901 to 2001

In England the population increased by 19m, 79 new prisons opened and 11 closed.

In Scotland the population increased by 0.2m, 10 new prisons opened and 9 closed.

 

From 2001 to 2011

In England the population increased by 4m, 12 new prisons opened and 13 closed.

In Scotland the population increased by 0.2m, 2 new prisons opened and 3 closed.

 

In the 210 years of this analysis,

in England the population grew by 44.25m and there were 86 more prisons. 

in Scotland the population grew by  3.5m and there were 2 fewer prisons.