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| Inside Eye, Wandsworth Prison as Seen Through the Prisoner's Eyes was published by Art Books International, 1999. |
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| Other articles by Carlo Gébler |
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| from Inside Eye, Wandsworth Prison as Seen Through the Prisoner's Eyes |
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| Art In Prison |
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| First of all, glasnost. I work in prison myself. I teach creative writing; once upon a time I did this at HMP Maze; now I work at Her Majesty's Prisons Maghaberry and Magilligan. I am absolutely in favour of art in prison. (But then I would be, wouldn't I?) I asked to review this book. |
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| The connection between art (in all forms) and prison is well known. Usually it is assumed prisoners only do art because they have so much time on their hands. Yes, that's true. However, art (in all its forms) is also the result of the prisoner having to spend so much time with only himself for company. It's out of solitude and self-interrogation that the art comes. That's why people paint and write so much in prison. Prisoners will usually stop painting, or writing when they leave jail and only take it back up again when they come back into prison, Another interesting fact is that in prison, where the atmosphere is overwhelmingly male and philistine, arty activities like writing or painting are not derided. They are admired. Painters and writers have status on the wings. |
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| Because of 'security', photography has never really been tried in Britain's prisons, until 1993 that is. That year, Graham Clark, the governor of Wandsworth (and a keen amateur photographer himself), gave permission for the project from which resulted the book here under review. Four professional photographers went into the jail. Four prisoners from the Vulnerable Prisoner Unit and four Ordinary Decent Criminals from the main prison were selected. The eight were trained by the four professionals, given cameras and let loose on the wings to photograph. This book is an artfully arranged selection of their work. |
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| Now, the work. Some of it is good; some of it is bad. There are particularly good pictures of prison icons, bread and water, a naked light bulb, a prisoner's eye. There are views of Victorian pan-optic architecture. There are faces. However, it seems to me, looking at the photographs as a whole, that the underlying ideological position of the photographers was to criticize (or critique) prison as old fashioned and authoritarian. The very first proper prison photographs that you see (after the introduction) are a matching pair showing the prison circle. The caption explains that only prison personnel may set foot on the tiled centre while prisoners are forbidden to do this. The photographs illustrate this. In one picture, a nurse (I think) stands on the tiles, while in the other prisoners stand on the edge. Of course it's stupid to have a bit of the floor where prisoners can't go. But the prominent position these pictures occupied told me a great deal about the ideological premise that underpins 'Inside Eye'. |
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| But why shouldn't the prisoners who took the photographs criticize their prison? Of course there's no reason why they shouldn't and furthermore, as I know from my own experience prisoners do usually tend to have negative feelings about the places that incarcerate them. My problem is that I believe, judging by the introduction, the ideological underpinning came from the four professionals rather than out of the men themselves. |
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| In my book that is wrong. The intention should have been to make art, not polemic. Furthermore, I believe it is particularly important that we must not work in the community with non-professionals, as did the professional photographers here, because we want to empower those with whom we work, or because we believe it would be rehabilitative or therapeutic for those with whom we work. If we're artists, when we make our own work we want to make a masterpiece (although we know we'll fail) and when we work in the community the same rules should obtain. When we parachute into the lives of others our only goal should be a masterpiece. Alas it didn't happen here, which is a pity because photography, of all the arts, is probably the art best suited to prison. |
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| Carlo Gébler |
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