How can photography be used to rehabilitate in prisons?
A new book, The San Quentin Project, addresses this. It features a largely unseen archive of daily life inside one of America’s oldest and largest prisons. Here, we chat to the book’s author Nigel Poor about why the archive proved to be the perfect “bridge for conversation” between her and her incarcerated students.
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“Prison changes everything. This is what people who have done time understand,” writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet, lawyer, memoirist and teacher in the foreword of
. As a formally incarcerated person, Reginald is privy to the fact. He understands that any interaction with the prison system, be it positive or negative, leaves an imprint. It’s something artist and professor of photography Nigel Poor understands too, but from a different perspective, as collaborating with incarcerated people has been a large focus of her work since she first began volunteering at San Quentin State Prison in 2011.