Los Angeles-based photographer Alyse Emdur’s ongoing project Prison Landscapes sources images from visiting rooms of U.S. prisons to offer a rare and powerful window into the world of incarceration. The inspiration behind the project dates back to 2005 when she came across a photo of her visiting her brother in a state prison at age five. The project pairs portraits of inmates in front of prisoner-painted backdrops photos that have been sent to her through years of correspondence with inmates with images she took of these backdrops within various prisons, revealing the stark contrast between these bucolic scenes and the corresponding prison interiors. The tension between the two elements presents a complex reading of photography’s power to both maintain and escape physical and psychological limits in life.
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