Working title of PhD: Imagining a Polyvocal Prison Image Archive: Dialogical Photography and the Aesthetics of Ethics in spaces of incarceration
Institution: Glasgow School of Art
Full or part-time: Full time
Year Commenced Study: 2021
PhD Supervisors: Marguerite Schinkel (Glasgow University), Gina Wall and Nicky Bird (GSA)
Funding Source: Carnegie Trust
Synopsis of PhD:
Working with photography in a prison is ethically complex, due to the historic symbiosis of prisons and photography, and the stark inequity between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people. This practice-based research project explores methods for turning towards and articulating these challenges asking,
What new ways of working with photography emerge from the collaborative creation of a photographic archive with imprisoned people? And, drawing on artist Walead Beshty (2015), How does the social and ethical context in which collaborative photography takes place become visible? I take Ariella Azoulay’s work (2019) on the interactions surrounding the photographic moment as a starting point for addressing these questions.
During a year-long series of workshops with imprisoned people at HMP Dumfries in Southwest Scotland, we collected, generated, curated and discussed images that reflected aspects of the prison that co-creators felt should be remembered. We developed a para-archival approach (Slager, 2015) that presents poetic logic as an alternative to the illogicality of the prison. Installing and documenting artwork in the prison was key, bringing creative practice into conversation with institutional space. The outcome is a layered, polyvocal record of a place. It is also a collaborative meditation on what it is to record, to document, to create and co-create, and what it means to do so whilst imprisoned. The nuances of the project are captured through an ethical framework – which informed planning and delivery – my reflection on roles and collaborative modes (facilitated by audio recordings of workshops) and through the artwork itself. Each of these elements was the subject of detailed discussion with co-creators and their contributions crucially informed my understanding of the project.
The impact of the prison environment on the collaborative process and the images we produced was all-pervasive, but the project opened an ‘interstice’, a small space for creativity and collaboration. Crucially however, the value of projects like this is in both making space for and visualising something that imprisoned people are already experts in, that is the daily practice of creativity, hope and aesthetics that is essential for survival in prison (Fleetwood, 2020, Kelly, 2022).
The project makes an original argument for the potential value of collaborations between incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists, that is in making space for the practice of the interstice. Turning towards ethical challenges can lead to new understandings of photography and power in the prison. The significance of this work is in interrogating methods for placing ethical complexity at the centre of a collaborative project, and articulating the nuances of the process. This should be of interest to those pursuing collaborative research in the arts and social sciences, and more specifically to artists working with participatory photography.
