Another project,
Prison Landscapes (2012)
by Alyse Emdur, documents the freedom-evoking backdrops, such as tropical beaches and waterfalls, which prisoners are allowed to pose in front of for photographs when family and friends visit. Inspired by her conversation with Emdur, Nestor is optimistic about the project’s role in giving prisoners visibility on their own terms but also wonders if it perpetuates ‘yearning or a false sense of hope’.
Alyse Emdur,
State Correctional Institution - Graterford, Pennsylvania, 2012. Courtesy: the artist
As the writer negotiates this complex moral terrain with sensitivity, asserting her understanding ‘of the fine line between “research” and voyeurism’, she implicates the reader in this very act of looking. The consequences of such representations, she suggests, should not only be the concern of artists but of all those who engage in sensationalist penal spectatorship, such as true crime dramas. Nestor makes the case for those who