Sites of Incarceration
I found Pete Brook’s thought-provoking Prison Photography blog via consumptive (another thought-provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s definitely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask pertinent questions:
If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the photograph as social document, therefore, what social and political powers are at play in a photograph’s manufacture? And, how is knowledge, related to those powers, constructed?
It’s implicit, I think, that these are questions we could — should, even — direct at all photography, not just the photography of “sites of incarceration”.
On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read something that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:
[…] I think photographers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice photography these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]
I think other people do notice photography, and I think that some will notice the aesthetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of contemporary photography (and likewise contemporary poetry, contemporary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appreciation within a quite insular, self-contained, elitist milieu.