Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture

by Bruce Jackson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592139507
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	08/21/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

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.

Table of Contents

1. Pictures from a Drawer
2. Restoring the Eyes
3. Size
4. Dating the Images
5. The Women
6. Portraits
7. Seeing People
8. The Order of Things
9. Mirrors
The Portraits
Appendix: Cooter’s Yellow Pad
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

In a stimulating introductory essay accompanying this collection of extraordinary photographic portraits, Jackson (The Story Is True) recalls visiting in 1975 Arkansas's Cummins state prison farm, where an inmate invited him to fill his pockets with about 200 discarded prisoner identification photographs, likely dating from 1915 to 1940. Drawn at random from a forgotten drawer, these worn and badly yellowed artifacts were (absent the dossiers they served and enhanced) anonymous traces of both a system of control and the lives-male and female, African-American and white-lived inside it. Their publication in large portrait format awaited 21st-century digital technology to make their restoration and reclamation possible. Shrewdly, Jackson balances their remarkable refurbishment with a strong sense of provenance (retaining staple holes and creases, for example), while eschewing any attempt to connect each haunting image with a particular crime or narrative. Given unprecedented and (from the perspective of their original purpose) utterly unintended scope, the human dimensions of these images grant each an irreversible dignity for the first time, while simultaneously taking on the essential characteristic Jackson names: they become "mirrors" of ourselves. (Mar.)

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Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher