Representing the Prison: Documentary and the Iconography of Punishment

• In Event: Visual Criminology and the Penal Spectacle

Abstract

Imprisonment has been the subject of documentary photographers for several decades now, encompassing Danny Lyon’s Conversations with the Dead, which depicts prison life in Texas State Prisons in the late 1960s, through to Richard Ross’s ongoing Juvenile in Justice project documenting the incarceration of American youth. Indeed, the website and blog at www.prisonphotography.org lists some 120 professional practitioners who have sought to convey the pains of confinement in visually striking ways. Although the genre can be condemned and dismissed for its morbid fascination with human suffering, it also offers new ways of seeing social practices and it is this dynamic which will be explored in the paper. In doing so, the paper will seek to intervene in the broader cultural turn in the sociology of punishment, which has focused on the force of representation and its consequences in recent years.

Author

• Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex