The Critical Carceral Visualities research team has published its third StoryMap, Images of Detained Youth through an Abolitionist Lens. These StoryMaps encourage viewers to interrogate the fraught relationship between visual culture and the carceral state by exploring how imagery simultaneously reveals and obfuscates the reality of mass incarceration.
Images of Detained Youth through an Abolitionist Lens examines pinhole photographs made collaboratively by artist Steve Davis and incarcerated girls in the state of Washington. While much art created in carceral contexts mobilizes portraiture to facilitate sympathetic identification and “humanization”, we read these photographs as withdrawing from this norm. Instead of the faces of young people, which might allow viewers to imagine “redeemable” qualities of those in confinement, Davis and his collaborators offer us smudgy form, soft gray tones and ultimately, ambiguity. The aesthetics of these photographs, which lead investigator Dr. Ruby Tapia theorizes as “facelessness” in The Camera in the Cage: Prison Photography and the Abject Sentimentality of the Exception (forthcoming, Fordham), leads us away from consuming art produced within the carceral state as a pillar of or for liberal reformism. Our readings refuse to focus on the individual because the violence of the carceral state must (also) be seen as structural.
Visit the StoryMap to explore how these images offer a framework with which to critique the carceral state rather than to contemplate the stories of individual faces and singular experiences.
