Behind the Scenes: Prison Theatre by Sasha Maslov

It sounds asinine to describe a prison as beautiful. Perhaps, the warm tones of the theatre-house in Kharkiv’s penal colony are a lure. But, I don’t want to budge on this; Maslov’s images are sumptuous.

Let us not forget though, the photographic series, however beautiful, is the product of specific circumstances. The more we know about these circumstances the better equipped we are to understand them and their content. Last week, Sasha and I talked over Skype about the details of the project.

How did you arrive upon the subject?
I had a couple of friends who had been running a theatre class in a prison in Kharkiv, Ukraine. I thought it was a great subject so I went along. Theatre performers aren’t what you expect to see in a prison. Being an actor is a ridiculous notion for criminals; you’re basically putting yourself in the position of the fool. The prison was maximum security so they were in there for serious crimes. At the beginning it was … kind of creepy, but then I got used to it.

I wanted to shoot with film. Initially, the warden said I’d have to use digital equipment, but I explained it was essential I used film and showed him some of my images. In the end, he permitted it.

It looks like you were you there for the final performances. How long had they been rehearsing and how many times did you visit?
They’d been working on the play for 9 months. I went in three times, but most of the shots from the project were taken on the day of the main performance.

What message did you hope to communicate with the project?
I go into all projects very open, without really knowing what it’s going to be like and if I will actually have anything at all in the end; what can I see? What can I tell? I think this is best.

Some of your subjects seem uncomfortable with the camera?
Yes. It is understandable as cameras aren’t something they are used to. Some don’t want to be seen for obvious reasons. Those acting in the troupe were more open to being photographed. I felt like during the new experience for them with this theatre they opened new horizons, but generally in prison the feeling is that the camera is not your friend.

I actually tried to shoot in two  prisons, they other being a women’s prison but nothing came out of that project. The women acted very differently around the camera. Every time they saw the camera they’d change something. They’d usually smile. They would present themselves for the camera. The women always smiled.  Once, I caught a glance of a female prisoners glaring at a male guard. It was a real wolf glare. I lifted the camera, but instantly she saw me and changed her look. Her eyes became those of kittens.

Perhaps this desire to perform or adapt for the camera by female prisoners is something you could work with in the future? Deborah Luster worked with the females in the Louisiana prison system making portraits of them in full theatrical costumes.
Yes, it would be interesting to shoot there again.  But also, people aren’t totally truthful. They can’t talk about things that are difficult. I wasn’t allowed in their cells.  The experience changed me. Not massively, but it did make me look at things a little differently.

In Ukraine can one assume certain things about the prison population? I ask this because in America’s medium security prisons where men can be serving long to life sentences, some may not be there because they are violent offenders. It is the non-violent men who are warehoused who seem to lose most through harsh sentencing. Does this mix of offender-types occur in Ukraine?

I cannot say. Of course, I never asked. One inmate did say to me, “You don’t have to pretend to respect me. You know I am in here because of something terrible I did.” But, I wasn’t pretending to respect anyone. These people were new for me, if you don’t consider the place where the [project] took place you are not able to form any prejudice.

Do you know what percentage of the men would eventually be released?
No, but I know some were due to be released very soon. One actor was due to be released one day before of the performance, but he preferred to stay for another week so that he could perform the show.

Right before show began I took a shot of a woman in the audience. I will never forget this moment. Later I found out she was a mother of one of the inmates in the troupe. She had come to tell him that his brother had died on the outside. She waited until after he’d finished the show because she didn’t want to ruin his performance. It was only afterward when I found this out I understood why she did not smile during the show.

And how was the show?
The dramatics were amazing to see. Many of the men struggled over and above their usual habits to get the lines out. The play was The House that Swift Built, which is a fiction about a house full of ridiculous items and fantastic people. Jonathan Swift tells unbelievable stories and plays practical jokes, the nature of existence in and outside the house is questioned. The players have the potential to transform their lives. Of course it was interesting to see this done by prisoners.

Still, many of the lines were delivered with arrogance. Even in soft conversation, the actors came across as brash. They are used to being in a defensive position so there was always a strange arrogance … or little aggression.

Did the inmates see your prints?
Yes, I sent prints to the prison. If there was a shot with two prisoners in it, I’d send two copies. I don’t know how they divided all the works among the guys but I know they got them.

Did you ever have to secure model release forms?
[Laughs] No. I only had to agree on the project with the warden. The fact my friends had been there a while also made my case easier. The warden was forward thinking by Ukrainian standards. He was interested in the publicity it would gain for his prison.

What are the general thoughts of prisons among the Ukrainian public?
That they are places you shouldn’t go. Prisons are tough everywhere. After you get out, you just have a new set of complexes.

How do former-prisoners fare in Ukraine? For example, ex-prisoners in the US have to petition to gain their right to vote back. How does it compare?
Ukrainian prisoners can vote in prison. But, more generally, prison is forever a stain on your character. Human rights violations occur in prisons all the time – stabbings, abuses of power by the guards. You hear about these things on the news. But these instances are just pieces of sand on the beach. It could be a much larger problem. Perhaps it is but we don’t hear about it.

Well, it is an amazing glimpse for us all to get at an arts program inside a Ukrainian prison. What equipment did you use?
I shot with a Kiev 6S, a 6×6 medium format camera. It is bulky and heavy. I really liked working with it but I was always very visible to the prisoners with this thing in my hands. And the sound that it makes is beyond any politeness.

What comes next?
I have two things on. I have just got back from Donbass, a region in Eastern Ukraine where I was doing a story on coal miners. It was an amazing experience, because for 20 years nothing has changed there except dramatic decline of population. There are small towns that lived off coal mines in Soviet period, but many mines were shut down or there are places where 5-6 thousands people worked and now there are 50-70 miners. It’s sad and fascinating area. The story will be out in a few weeks. I am also working on a show of photographic portraits for a gallery in Ukraine.

How do you pick your subjects?
I do what I think is important. I don’t plan too far ahead. I’ll be interested to see what happens in the near future with the industry.

You heard this month about Christopher Anderson saying, “The death of journalism is bad for society, but we’ll be better off with less photojournalism. I won’t miss the self-important, self-congratulatory, hypocritical part of photojournalism at all. The industry has been a fraud for some time.”

I didn’t but he could be right. There are trends in photography. When the trends change, there seems to be two types of response. The first is to chase and feed the trend. The second is – in the uncertainty – to stick to what is valuable to you, and that will usually be something you like. The best work will always come form that second approach. And as for the market; the market is like the ocean. It can change three or four times a day. There’s no use in trying to predict that.

True. Thanks Sasha
Thank You.

Sasha Maslov has shown this work before at Vewd and at his Lightstalkers profile.

Jeff Barnett-Winsby: Aiding and Abetting

Okay, Jeff Barnett-Winsby did not aide and abet anyone.

He was, however, indelibly tied to a fugitive pair of lovers – one an inmate, the other a prison volunteer. Winsby had done a couple of photo series at Lansing Correctional Center, Michigan. He knew – and photographed – both John Manard and Toby Young before Young drove a van out the prison with a dog-crate in the back. Manard was in the dog-crate. They were on the run for twelve days until the authorities caught up with them in Tennessee.

All the details about the police hunt and climactic high speed car chase, car crash and return to custody can be found here.

Toby was the founder and coordinator of the Safe Harbour Program, and John Manard, a dog-handler and Young’s escort within the prison. She was vulnerable, he was hopeful, they were close. Manard did most of the planning. “By the time he brought me in to what he was doing, I was in love with him and I couldn’t say no,” Young said. “I was not in a safe and sane place in my life, but I still could’ve said no, but I didn’t.” It seems like a straight up case of manipulation; a true power imbalance.

This tale is like something out of a movie. Jeff has muttered things about making a movie. We’ll see. At the very least, we can all look forward to his book Mark West & Molly Rose published J&L Books. Mark West and Molly Rose were Manard and Young’s aliases.

Barnett-Winsby dissects events as he experienced them over at Feature Shoot:

‘Early on, after the escape, I was contacted by the prison. I had taken the latest photos of John and they needed images which featured his newer tattoos. These photos ran on America’s Most Wanted and in other newspapers around the country. I was obligated to give these photos and felt pretty conflicted.

‘After they were transfered back to Kansas, John wrote an open letter to a Kansas City TV station professing his love and Toby’s innocence. I started writing to John in response to this and we traded several letters over a couple months. In them, he covered much of the escape story and described what sounded like a honeymoon.

‘Post graduation, I decided I needed to see where they had been so I headed to Tennessee, rented the same cabin and stayed there for several days. I thought a lot about how I should be spending my time while in Tennessee.

‘What I realized was that my interest in this story was not specifically about the escape, it was about what they were escaping for. I think I was down there trying to honor that’.

Barnett-Winsby’s gloss portraiture is pretty atypical of prisoner representations. It’s very giving.

The accompanying images of prisoners and their dogs work as a foil to the straight portraits. Instantly, our response to the inmate changes. Barnett-Winsby plays on visual dissonance. He exposes our inbuilt prejudice and softness toward animals: “If someone loves an animal they can’t be violent, right?”

As well as Safe Harbor, Barnett-Winsby also photographed the objects in single occupancy cells for his project Marks of Intention (below).

Barnett-Winsby has collapsed Safe Harbour and Marks of Intention along with images from the Mark West and Molly Rose story; it is a wide-reaching anthology of the Lansing facility and two lives that temporarily escaped its control.

You could say Barnett-Winsby had luck photographers only dream about when hunting for a good story.

Buy Mark West and Molly Rose.

Mark West and Molly Rose is published by J&L Books. The owner of J&L Books Jason Fulford was recently interviewed at Too Much Chocolate as was Jeff Barnett-Winsby.

A New Venture: Photography Prison

It might be unwise. It might be aborted if it only increases the speed of my daily internet treadmill. But …

Photography Prison is on Tumblr.

It is the alter-ego of Prison Photography, focused on more things photography than things prison.

Basically, I see loads of cool things in any given day and I’d like to share them without the production that goes into Prison Photography.

Hope you find some worth. I’ll reevaluate this Tumblr thing in 4 weeks, but until then you know you can enjoy all these things …

Homage to Abu Ghraib?

© Anton Kratochvil, from the series 'Homage to Abu Ghraib' (2006)

It may not be wise to question a photography project that was conceived of, and produced, in honour of the photographer’s father who was tortured in Stalinist labour camps.

But, is not Anton Kratochvil’s Homage to Abu Ghraib obsolete?

Kratochvil spoke at this weeks photo expo.

In reaction to a New York Times story that stated 80 percent of Americans had not heard of Abu Ghraib, Kratochvil created a series of set-up photographs that drew on the Abu Ghraib images as inspiration.

The work was published on the VII web site, where it was seen and then distributed virally. The work was unpublished in a traditional sense, “yet it created an uproar,” Kratochvil said. Mayes said the traditional media channels were “nonplussed” when they were offered the opportunity to publish the work. Kratochvil said the story was “not news but not fiction,” but it found an audience nonetheless.

We can presume that everyone who saw and then virally-forwarded these images knew already about Abu Ghraib. I can’t imagine that this series converted new recruits into the anti-war mindset or lured them into new emotional responses to the horrors of the War On Iraq or of Saddam’s primary prison/death-house.

Saddam Hussein’s ordered rushed and final hour executions of some opponents and turned others loose. Then the American Military moved in. Kratochvil’s images contain disconcerting echoes of US abuses at Abu Ghraib, but those echoes are insufficient, even unnecessary, in the context of the original images.

Only the personal catharsis and healing this series may or may not have provided Kratochvil could stand as basis for a discussion of worth here. And that, still, does not alter my personal opinion that this “homage” is misplaced at best, derisory at worst.

More here

Photoquai, Paris: A Photo Festival for Non-Western Photographers

© Rana Javadi. (This image is not in the show, but the artist is.)

Photoquai‘s mission : to highlight and make known, artists whose work is previously unexhibited or little known in Europe, to foster exchanges and the exchanging of views on the world.

The 2009 Photoquai biennial is directed by Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, an Iranian gallerist and founder of the Silk Road Gallery, Tehran – the only space in Iran dedicated to exhibiting photography.

Photoquai shows the work of 50 contemporary photographers from around the world, unknown or little known photographic talents in European terms, who come from Latin America, North America, Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Near and Middle East.

© Nomusa Makhubu

Presumably, Photoquai will propel debates about diversity and representation. I desperately wanted to write something important about Photoquai.

It is a photo-festival hell-bent on avoiding the usual names and well-worn paths of sight and (re)appreciation. But …

As part of my due diligence (sat on my arse, browsing the web, dipping into sources) I was stopped in my tracks by Colin Pantall’s “rant”:

Even 10 years ago, if you wanted to see somebody’s work, you had to buy the book or look in a magazine – which made buying a book or looking in a magazine that much more exciting and attractive. Now you just link to it and see it twittered and facebooked and blogged in a random stream of pictures that you have neither the time nor the will to linger on or contemplate. You can pretend viewing pictures like this is worthwhile in some way, but it’s not and it doesn’t allow for intelligent comment or insight to appear.

The idle, rapid-fire online viewing of photography has it’s knock on effects to writing about photography. Both are debased. I am as guilty as the next person.

So why should you listen to my opinion when I’ve not left my desk in the hour since I became aware of PhotoQuai? Read the following reviews from people who actually went and stood in front of the prints.

Jon Levy of Foto8 gives a pretty anemic description of his preview tour, but is ultimately thankful that new events are still blossoming despite the “undoubtedly harsh” climate for photojournalism.

Diane Smyth at 1854, the BJP blog, first has an overview of Photoquai. Smyth then provides a description of an “unusual exhibition in the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre. Portrait croises pairs a selection of 40 images from the Musee du Quai Branly’s extensive archive with indigenous sculptures and artworks from around the world.” Personally, the curatorial premise of this exhibit seems problematic – mainly because the pairings would seem to devalue the original meanings and conditions of production, if not strip them completely.

Marc Feustel of eyecurious loved the ambition but was “pretty disappointed” by the quality throughout. He felt guilty for criticising a small, brave, new-festival-on-the-block but couldn’t forgive the “photographers who should be tried for Photoshop crimes against photography.”

If you look through Jim Casper’s LensCulture gallery, you’ll sympathise with Feustel’s point.

© Daniela Edburg

© Nadiah Bamadhaj

Conclusions:

Iranian photography gets special attention on the 30 year anniversary of the revolution, and the approximate 20 year anniversary of the end of the Iran/Iraq war.

Afghanistan photography inevitably remains within the implications of its ban during Taliban rule.

Only a few well-known names are knocking about, noticeably Abbas Kowsari.

Pablo Hare is the darling so far.

© Pablo Hare

Darine Stern and Marge Simpson

It is interesting that of all the Playboy covers over the years, the recent Marge Simpson cover mimics Darine Stern’s.

Darine was the first African American woman to feature on a Playboy cover.

Qiana Mestrich – whose blog I highly recommend – alerted us all to this fact and goes into more detail about Stern’s life and death.

Toledano’s Dad and Commoditising Imperialism

Philip Toledano‘s Days With My Father has got some coverage recently, and rightly so. There is a perfect balance and appropriate tone throughout the series which is inescapable. Aline Smithson included it in Photographing Family – her well reasoned Too Much Chocolate piece about the imperative of family to photographers.

It is even more remarkable because it is such a departure from his cynical but pointed political work America The Gift Shop.

In a Decemebr, 2008 interview with Joerg, Toledano explained that for the really complex stuff he had to turn to China:

“Only the inflatable Guantanamo Bay prison cell and the Abu Ghraib bobblehead were made in China. The rest was made in America. To find Chinese manufacturers, I Googled ‘bouncy castle manufacturers, China’ or ‘bobblehead manufacturers, China’ and then emailed a few companies. It was really simple. And then, for the bobblehead, for instance, I sent the manufacturer the actual photo from Abu Ghraib, and they’d email me photos of progress, with me commenting along the way. The whole project, from start to finish, probably took me about six to eight months, all told. That’s the amazing thing about the web – ANYTHING is possible now.”

Benjamin Drummond, Sara Joy Steele, Nature and Washington State Prisons

Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele have been in the news recently for their Facing Climate Change initiative. They were featured by PDN as photographers who cared and secured a $10,000 Grant4Change.

I was super happy then, to see them diversify and change focus from massive global issues to the environmental issues of our region here in Washington State.

They teamed up with Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, Evergreen State College and The Sustainable Prisons Project (which I have talked about before) to produce a 7-minute multimedia piece with a gorgeous mix of inmate, staff, student and academic volunteer voices. They also deliver the goods for the stills gallery.

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The Sustainable Prison Project has proved that environmental justice, social justice and fiscal conservatism can be delivered all in the same package. I teach in a prison and the resolve to try new programs and learn new skills is not something left wanting.

Drummond and Joy Steele’s documents make it clear more than ever that prisons often are not – and really never should be – the intimidating “neverwheres” that media (often TV and film) depict them as.