Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture - Hardcover

Jackson, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592139485 ISBN 13: 9781592139484

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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 and 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 long-time inmate.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture, University at Buffalo. He is the author of more than 20 other books, including The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple), a documentary filmmaker and photographer. The French government named him Chevalier in L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest honor in the arts and humanities.

Review

“Printed large, these images depict individuals, people who had substance and weight in this world. You can’t trivialize faces when they’re printed large. You can’t staple them to an inner page of a folder and close the folder and file the folder away in a box or drawer that will never again be reopened. Printed large, their eyes meet your eyes.” —From the introduction

“Pictures from a Drawer is one of the most complex and compelling tales of the origin of documentary imagery I've ever read. Jackson writes clearly and insightfully in ways that help us understand the images before us while still leaving the pictures ample room to extend their own meanings to us. His attempt to explain their origin, function, and language is original and nuanced. Jackson presents no easy answers about prison life, and in so doing is suggesting something very real and important about any rendering of another person in an image. In the end, though, after providing wonderful context, Jackson gives us the photographs and leaves us—and them—to derive the latent meanings.  Jackson has crafted a book about just what it means to make and see a portrait.”—Tom Rankin, Director, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1592139485
• ISBN 13: 9781592139484
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200