Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture

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 1915-1940. As Jackson describes in an absorbing introduction, the function of these ph...