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VISUAL ART
Incarcerated images
A UB professor’s wide-angle view of prison life
By Nancy J. Parisi
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Bruce Jackson; photo by Nancy J. Parisi.
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Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.
—Susan Sontag, from Regarding the Pain of Others
We humans still enjoy a public hanging. There is a long history of visual cautionary tales, kicks in the pants that hopefully keep the majority of us citizens from sliding over to the dark side—and keep those with authority mindful of justice.
The late novelist and theorist Susan Sontag caused a sensation with her 1977 book On Photography, detailing the documentary powers and social responsibilities of those manning the cameras. In 2003, Regarding the Pain of Others revisited her earlier words.
Bosch’s visions of Hades, Victorian gatherings around hanging trees, photo documentation of manmade horrors, and television shows situated in courtrooms and prisons demonstrate our fascination with suffering, penitence, and redemption. Nineteenth-century Eastern State Penitentiary (outside of Philadelphia) and Alcatraz Island (off the coast of San Francisco) are protected national landmarks that further demonstrate the links between prison history and sightseeing. And what would Sontag have made of the hanging of Iraq’s dictator Hussein in 2006, viewed by millions on YouTube?
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Photo from Cummins Prison Farm, Arkansas, 1975. By Bruce Jackson.
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Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos asked Bruce Jackson, ethnographer, documentary filmmaker, photographer, and professor—who has documented U.S. prisons for forty years—to show a collection of his 1970s prison-based photographic fieldwork at the museum. The resulting exhibition, Cummins Wide: Photographs from the Arkansas Prison, opened on January 23 and is on view until May 10 in the museum’s Clifton link. The sixty-two images are black and white documentary photographs mainly made with a quirky, ultrawide Widelux camera. Jackson scanned his old negatives and printed them out in his jam-packed second-floor home study. They are richlytoned, deeply humanizing images of what everyday life was like for prisoners and guards at Cummins.
Jackson, a burly font of projects and opinion, is also Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture in University at Buffalo’s department of English. Within the Buffalo community he is best known for his never-a-punch-pulled Peace Bridge Chronicles, a series of articles about the interminable Peace/Signature Bridges matter, as well as The Casino Chronicles, about the legalities of inner-city gambling casinos. These were published in Artvoice and on his website, Buffalo Report (www.buffaloreport.com). (Fun fact: the name of Jackson’s site is printed on his vanity plates.) He and his wife, fellow UB professor Diane Christian, have collaborated on several documentary film projects, and they co-present the popular Tuesday night Buffalo Film Seminars at Market Arcade Film and Arts Center. The series is open to the public but is also part of a UB course.
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Photo from Cummins Prison Farm, Arkansas, 1975. By Bruce Jackson.
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Over coffee at the Jackson-Christian home at the edge of Delaware Park, I asked Jackson how he became so committed to the documentation of southern prisons. “There are two parts to that,” he begins. “One is simple. I grew up in polyglot, poly-cult Brooklyn and my world was always very rich ethnically—Jewish and Italian, one block away was all black, and one block away in another direction was all Puerto Rican.
“That contributed to it, but specifically in the fifties when I was in college, I got into folk music. I performed at places, but I was never that good a musician. I decided that I should get some material, so I went out and started recording music: I knew of the Lomax recordings so I went to a southern prison. The first time I heard Texan prisoners performing work songs, I knew I was full of shit and I never performed again.”
In the sixties Jackson received a four-year fellowship to Harvard Society of Fellows that gave him “the resources to work anywhere I wanted; that’s when I started working in Texas, mostly recording music and then looking at the prison cultural scene.” Via fieldwork Jackson heard of the Cummins prison in Arkansas, a prison that mirrored the state of slaves on a plantation: prisoners worked in fields; guards watched on horseback.
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Photo from Cummins Prison Farm, Arkansas, 1975. By Bruce Jackson.
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Prisoners’ rights in the sixties and seventies were being examined just as the civil rights of those on the outside were under debate. Cummins was deemed unconstitutional with documented cases of abuse. Jackson had incredible access because, he states, “people in positions of authority were not so paranoid … I got my first access because I was a grad student studying music and the wardens considered it innocent. When I started studying more complicated stuff, they were used to me and didn’t pay attention to me, a liberal Jew Yankee.” At that time he was told he was allowed to photograph “because if [we] don’t let people like you in, how will we know what we’re doing wrong?” This type of access is unheard of today; only sanitized and controlled tours are allowed for credentialed journalists and photojournalists.
The images of Cummins Wide are essentially twice as wide as a full-frame image made with a 35 mm. camera. The quirky Widelux camera records just about what humans can see in one instant—straight ahead and peripherally. Wideluxes have a lens that moves across the camera body, and a level helps a shooter figure out how best to avoid excessive curviness within the frame.
Jackson explains, “The Widelux is particularly good for things where there’s a horizon in the middle and action extends back … Any time you have a photo you always know the point of view; it’s where the lens is. What happens in these photos very often is you have people outside of your normal point of view looking at you: I’m looking at this scene but this scene and I are part of the scene that [a prisoner] is looking at.”
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An interior photo from Cummins Prison farm, Arkansas, 1975, by Bruce Jackson.
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Jackson also mentions that he’s “ecstatic” to have a show at his “hometown gallery”: he’s shown his work at the Museum of Modern Art (which he considers his other hometown gallery, from his formative years). Currently, amongst several other projects, he’s working on a series of images about that lush Olmsted-designed park across the street from his home.
Nancy J. Parisi has been a journalist and photojournalist in Buffalo for two decades and in 2005 completed an MFA at Parsons School of Design. She is a proud urban pioneer and has lived in the city’s Old First Ward for over fifteen years.
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