Jane Evelyn Atwood began photographing in women’s prisons in 1989, and the work consumed her for a decade. She visited 40 institutions across the US and Europe, in Israel and the former Soviet Union collecting images and first-hand stories from inmates in the most comprehensive project of its kind. Her prison book was called Too Much Time, a title that might equally have referred to her own obsessive immersion in the subject and to the lives of the people she photographed. In her introduction she wrote: “People often ask how I could pursue such a ‘sad’ subject for so long. Curiosity was the initial spur. Surprise, shock and bewilderment gradually took over. Rage propelled me along the road.”
Many of Atwood’s pictures, revisited in a new exhibition, are harrowing; some helped to change the world. (Her image of a woman giving birth in handcuffs in an Alaska jail sparked an international campaign to ban that barbaric practice. The UK ended the practice in 1997; a federal law in the US eventually followed though shackling remains widespread.) Taken together, Atwood’s images are a testament to her determination to provide a full inside story.
This picture is unusual for the presence of male inmates. The women’s prison in Metz, France, had a special facility that allowed couples who were imprisoned in different parts of the prison visiting rights. The couple on the left were serving time for selling kitchens that never materialised. The couple on the right were involved in a foreign exchange scam. By the time she took this picture, in 1990, Atwood was already an expert in the banal and tragic detail of inmates’ daily lives: the low-backed dress, the pine hatches, the awkward nightclub embraces, all gesture toward freedoms from another life.
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Jane Evelyn Atwood’s Women in Prison photographs are on show as part of Inside /Outside: Counterviews on Prisonat the Delta, Namur, Belgium until 28 January
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