[electronic resource]

Pictures from a DrawerPrison and the Art of Portraiture

---

For more than forty years, Bruce Jackson has been documenting—in books, photographs, audio recording and film—inmates' lives in American prisons. In November 1975, he acquired a collection of old ID photos while he was visiting the Cummins Unit, a state prison farm in Arkansas. They are published together for the first time in this remarkable book. The 121 images that appear here were likely taken between 1915-1940. As Jackson describes in an absorbing introduction, the function of these photos was not portraiture— their function was to "fold a person into the controlled space of a dossier." Here, freed from their prison "jackets" and printed at sizes far larger than their originals, these one-time ID photos have now become portraits. Jackson's restoration transforms what were small bureaucratic artifacts into moving images of real men and women. Pictures from a Drawer also contains an extraordinary description of everyday life at Cummins prison in the 1950s, written originally by hand and presented to Jackson in 1973 by its author, a longtime inmate.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

-

Publisher

: .,

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781592139507

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Electronic books
Photography

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment