Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2018 i Aperture

Sally Mann For more than four decades, Sally Mann has explored “the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavor,” says Sarah Greenough, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, where a major survey of Mann’s elegiac black-andwhite photographs arrives this spring. Featuring 125 works, the exhibition includes several images by the Virginia-born artist that have never been published or shown until now, and looks at Mann’s relationship with her native land, “how it has shaped her work, and how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—continues to inform American identity and experience.” Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 4–May 28, 2018 Being: New Photography 2018…

A visionary legal thinker, Bryan Stevenson has protected the rights of the vulnerable through his work as a death-row lawyer. With the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization he founded in 1994, Stevenson has made strides to end mass incarceration and challenge racial and economic injustice. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court, recently winning a watershed ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children seventeen and under are unconstitutional. Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, recounts his experiences navigating an unfair criminal justice system. But his work extends beyond the legal realm—Stevenson is invested in shifting cultural narratives and making history visible. This is work to which Harvard professor and art historian Sarah Lewis, guest editor of Aperture’s 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue, is uniquely attuned. Lewis has written at…

A photograph means more in prison. Tacked on a cell wall, it can be one of the few connections to life outside—to the Christmases, birthdays, and graduations passing, or the children and grandchildren growing older. And, in the rare moments when the incarcerated themselves are the subject, it can be validation within a dehumanizing system: You are still here. You exist. That’s what Jack Lueders-Booth found at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham when he became what a friend called “the school photographer of Framingham prison,” one of the oldest women’s prisons in the country. For seven years, in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Lueders-Booth photographed the prisoners of Framingham for a series of intimate and challenging portraits. The photographs have almost none of the visual shortcuts that we associate with prison.…

In 2013, two weeks before Easter, Deborah Luster and I went to document The Life of Jesus Christ, a passion play being performed for the general public at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a maximum-security prison. Cathy Fontenot, now a former assistant warden at the prison, who initiated these performances in 2012, saw it as an opportunity to humanize incarcerated people for an audience of free people. An implausible coincidence led Luster and me to this project. We both had a parent who was murdered. Both murders happened in the same city, Phoenix, Arizona. They were both contract killings. Many years later, after establishing our separate lives, we met when I moved to New Orleans, where it turned out our houses were two blocks away from each other. Luster had…

Jesse Krimes was an artist before he was a prisoner. But in 2009, when Krimes— who studied studio art at Millersville University and is now an activist for prison reform—was indicted by the U.S. government for a nonviolent drug offense and sentenced to seventy months, his world was dramatically altered. Confined to a cell for twenty-three hours a day during his first year in prison, Krimes turned to art to cope. Until his release, in 2013, Krimes made clandestine works of art, often with ingenious methods of transferring photographic images from newspapers onto prison-issued bars of soap or sheets using hair gel purchased from the commissary, and sent them home, piece by piece, through the mail. Krimes’s monumental mural Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13)—the title derives from the Greek origin of the word…

In 1960, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held The Sense of Abstraction, its second show on the relationship between photography and abstract art in under ten years. Following Abstraction in Photography, in 1951, which mixed scientific and fine art photographs, The Sense of Abstraction shifted direction, redefining the topic at hand. The curatorial approach of the 1960 show was bolstered by the international profile of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the posthumous celebrity of its fastestburning star, Jackson Pollock. MoMA curator Grace Mayer brought together three hundred works by over seventy artists, with many names that one would expect at this time, such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer, but also with a look back to the generation of László Moholy-Nagy, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston. Recently, while researching…

He was born in Buffalo, New York, but Gregory Halpern found the light in California. His award-winning photobook ZZYZX (2016), named for a village and former mineral springs spa near the Mojave Desert, presents images that move westward across Los Angeles in a five-year chronicle of vivid, seemingly unrelated scenes—a blue tarp punched with holes, a smoky mountainside, a staircase leading nowhere, a couple towing carts of their possessions. Whether in Los Angeles or Rochester, where he lives, Halpern pursues the American themes of isolation and manifest destiny with a sense of enigmatic, open-ended beauty. Early British punk I became fascinated by punk hilariously late in life, at age thirty. What I like is that it feels like art made from the body as much as from the head— and…

Photography has a long-standing relation to policing. Not long after its invention, in 1839, the technology began to be used for the twinned purposes of identification and surveillance. In Paris, the police deployed photography in efforts to pinpoint serial offenders, and also to instruct a broader population in methods of scrutiny. Police departments in the United States started photographing arrested men and women as early as the 1850s, and displayed their portraits for public viewing in rogues’ galleries. Early ambrotypes and tintypes captured suspects in a range of gray hues, encircled by ornamental brass frames; occasionally, their cheeks have been tinted pink. Later in the nineteenth century, as photographs became easy and inexpensive to reproduce as paper prints, the mug shot was used widely in police departments throughout Europe and…

Zarinah Shabazz: You were both introduced to photography by members of your family at an early age. As young men, you both became corrections officers. How did you each decide to work in corrections? Lorenzo Steele, Jr.: I grew up in Queens. My father was a disciplinarian, and my mother was a disciplinarian. We were the generation that your father and mother were like, “Listen, take those city tests, those civil service tests.” I took the test. One day, my mother said, “You’ve got mail.” I opened it up, and it was from the Department of Correction. I had passed the test. This was 1987, and I was twenty-two years old. Jamel Shabazz: I had just come home from the army in the summer of 1980. At that time, I…

Since 1994, I have had an exchange of words and images with my cousin Allen, who was sentenced to life in prison at the age of eighteen. We write to each other regularly, often reminiscing about growing up in southwest Ohio. There is such a familiarity in our connection, although our time together is limited to a couple of hours during each of my visits to see him. Allen and I grew up as siblings, along with several other first cousins in our large and close-knit family. His mother is my mother’s older sister, and child-rearing was very much a group effort that was shared among all the female relatives. Allen ends all his letters to me in the same way: “Niki, send more pictures. Love, your lil cuz Allen.”…

Most prisons and jails across the United States do not allow prisoners to have access to cameras. How, then, can images tell the story of mass incarceration when the imprisoned don’t have control over their own representation? How can photographs visualize a reality that, for many, remains outside of view? Nicole R. Fleetwood, this issue’s contributing editor, is an expert on the intersections of art and incarceration. But for her, the story is personal. “My initial awareness of mass incarceration,” she says, “came from growing up in a working-class black community in southwest Ohio that was highly policed, routinely harassed, and repeatedly brutalized by local police forces.” This was also a time, in the 1980s and early ’90s, when the so-called War on Drugs, the impact of deindustrialization (especially on…

In 1999, at the tail end of a trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, the artist Nigel Poor found herself standing outside Kresty Prison, the infamous eighteenth-century compound where Leon Trotsky was once held and Anna Akhmatova visited her incarcerated son. Scattered on the ground were dozens of paper cones, weighed down with pieces of bread, small missives tossed out by those behind Kresty’s brick walls. Poor bent down, picked up one of the cones, and took it back home to San Francisco. She has never opened it up. “I wanted to live with the mystery,” she told me one morning as she sat in her car, preparing to make a now frequent commute to California’s San Quentin State Prison. Since the 1990s, Poor’s photographic series of found items, or banned…

What do we know, through images, of prisons and jails in the United States? What do we see of the sprawling, brutalizing, and failed systems? How do taxpayers view their prisons? Which images shape our imagination of and future responses to mass incarceration? In 2008, I founded Prison Photography, an ongoing research project that examines and contextualizes images of U.S. prisons. It started as a blog—a personal inquiry played out in public. By virtue of longevity and quantity, it has morphed into a public resource, a digital archive that, in some ways, serves as a form of memory. When I began, I thought images could serve as a way to draw people into the uneasy conversations about fear, mass incarceration, inequality, institutional violence, and vengeance. Prison Photography’s over fifteen hundred…

Huntsville is a prison town. Situated on over fifty acres of land near the town’s center, the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville is the oldest prison in the state of Texas, built in 1849, only four years after Texas was annexed to the United States. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is headquartered in Huntsville, and it is the largest employer in the city. More than fifteen thousand people are incarcerated behind the fifteen-foot red brick walls that surround the correctional facility. Huntsville prison is a hub. At the end of their sentences, men from other prisons throughout Texas are bused to Huntsville—it is a release center for the region, the largest in the state. About one hundred men are released from Huntsville daily, Monday through Friday. The numbers are…