With 2.3 million people in prison the United States has the largest prison population in the world. An estimated 2.7 million American children have a parent in prison. Every Friday and Saturday night hundreds of New Yorkers, mostly women, many with children, undertake 24-hour trips and get on private buses and mini vans to drive all night in order to spend a few hours the next day with their husbands, brothers, mothers and fathers, who have been placed in prisons hundreds of miles from the city. March 7, 2014.

I did, though, manage to pop into the San Quentin News newsroom, and they took a hard drive out of a locked cabinet because I said I had an interest in prison photographs. I asked, “What do the archives of this newspaper look like?” So I was able to flick through, and they had more variation.

KPA: Because there were photographs that were made and not allowed to be published, but they are still stored on the hard drive?

PB: Yeah, in some cases. And then some stuff just gets through. Like there was a folder of images from the kitchen in the mess hall, and it was just a few guys in the morning working and chopping vegetables and getting things set up.

KPA: Daily life.

PB: Those images spoke to the labor that is done by prisoners in this old, old kitchen. And the daily operations just to keep the facility going. That felt new to me. So, my assumption is that it would be new to other people, to just see what it looks like behind the scenes running a prison kitchen for thousands of men. It’s not new to anyone who lives and works there though.

KPA: Do you think your students would enjoy even the imaginative exercise of what a good photographic representation of prison would look like?

PB: We did it.

KPA: I definitely want to hear more about that. This was a planned assignment, or you said, “Hey, I hear your criticism of the paper, what do you think should be in it, instead?”

Isadora Kosofsky, from the series Still My Mother, Still My Father. Carlos holds his son, Damian, during a visit at the Everglades Reentry Center; Carlos hopes to become a counselor upon release and work beside his wife who is a drug detox clinician. Image courtesy of the artist.

PB: It was in the context of appreciating that the prison was locked down in terms of its visual culture, and that the administration ultimately has power. The students know that the types of prison images in film and TV particularly are skewed… and they know they don’t necessarily benefit from those skewed representations. And that even the prison newspaper has this process of censorship.

They’re not griping, nor complaining, but they see the visual culture for what it is. And so while we were writing the workshop curriculum I said, okay, we’re going to ask these high school students on the outside what they think prison looks like. And then after that exercise they are going to share short pieces by you where you write about an image from inside prison, that you know or can assume has not been photographed, but that you have seen, you have witnessed, and you would like to share.

KPA: This must be inspired by Mark Strandquist, whose work you featured in Prison Obscura.

PB: Oh yeah. I mean, inasmuch as that’s a really good approach to take if you’re interested in social practice and stories. There are a lot of groups in society to whom you can give cameras, and you can brainstorm pictures with, and then you can invite them to go out and make them. In prison you can brainstorm the pictures knowing that you’re never going to make them. And the double whammy there is that even if you did take them you know that they’re not getting out.

Jacobia Dahm, from the series The Prison Buses, 2013–2014. Jeremiah, 2, asleep as the bus is passing Attica prison in the early morning hours. Jeremiah is on his way to see his mother at Albion Correctional Facility. Albion is the largest women’s prison in NY state, 20 miles from the Canadian Border. Jeremiah lives in the Bronx with his grandmother. March 8, 2014. Image courtesy of Jacobia Dahm/REDUX

KPA: Right, double invisibility.

PB: Yeah. I had one student who was insistent that you would have to spend a day in the life and photograph every part of the prison. So that would be the Reception Center, West Block, North Block, the solitary confinement facility, the prison factory, the fire house, the prison hospital, the education buildings, the gardens, the yard, the maintenance buildings, the chapel, the clerks’ offices, the library. He was like, “Just do a massive survey. Make the point that this is one institution and one day.” And really try to describe the breadth of experience.

KPA: It’s like all of those day in the life projects, right? A group of 50 photographers across the US on April 11th, or whatever, and everyone photographs.

PB: Exactly, getting all Rick Smolan on it. Perhaps Smolan could do a workshop with the California Department of Corrections?!

I had another student who just described an image of his current self as compared with an image from his memory: “The first image is me watching a guy get stabbed to death outside of my cell as a 19-year-old. The second image is me in a classroom, brainstorming a curriculum to help teenagers understand the prison system, aged 32.”

KPA: Bookends. Then and now, before and after.

PB: From where he was thirteen years ago to where he was today.

I had one student who insisted all he could do would be to install thousands upon thousands of cameras that were recording 24 hours a day to the point that everyone should assume that they are being filmed all the time, prisoners AND staff. But then get to the point where they forget they’re being filmed, and that any member of the public, at any time, can go online and watch the feed from any camera they want. He said, “That’s the only way that the public will understand what is going on inside and where their tax dollars go.”

KPA: That’s remarkable. Did he reflect on what the effect of that total surveillance and total transparency might be?

PB: He felt it would make for public outrage potentially, but he wasn’t expecting that, because when we talked about it the guys were confused as to why there wasn’t public outrage decades ago. They just assumed that a lot of Americans know what goes on in their prisons and they just don’t care. Whether that is accurate or not ends up not mattering. Because not enough people on the outside are agitating for the system to change.

But more than anything, and this was consistent with a lot of the guys’ attitudes, there needed to be a check on staff abuses — abuses of the rules, abuses of power — and for there to be checks and accountability. They weren’t talking solely about San Quentin, nor suggesting San Quentin had specific problems. To the contrary, San Quentin was a lot more stabilized than a lot of the 32 other California prisons.

I am very wary about what I am saying on record here but I don’t think it is a mischaracterization to say that in the cumulative 600+ years that my students had spent behind bars, they’d experienced tensions between prisoners and staff. And those tensions are exacerbated by shit talk, and some correctional officers choose to shit talk and that doesn’t help maintain standards or dignity. Some officers are good, and then some officers are not. Just as some prisoners are good, and some prisoners are not. But if it comes down to a “I said, he said,” no one is listening to the prisoner. So I think my student thought that if there was a constant surveillance, it would be this third testimony, which would break you out of that eternal frustration of knowing that you have no power. Just think… and this is a hypothetical for any prison, not San Quentin… if someone on staff purposefully or accidentally steals your shit, injures you, conspires against you, whatever the wrong or the harm is, currently it’s the prisoner’s word against theirs and the prisoner’s word 99 times out of a hundred counts for nothing. My student could envision a constant surveillance and describe its application as a check on power and as a third “witness”.

Image courtesy of Isadora Kosofsky

KPA: In class, you were talking about the structural elements of mass incarceration and the effects of it on the populations. To have that conversation is not neutral, obviously.

PB: No, but I was in San Quentin as a teacher and a workshop leader. I did not hide my politics; honesty and one’s word is very important always and especially inside prison. Prisoners, especially those at San Quentin who interact with many civilians are wary of people entering the prison with radical politics to push. The men require and deserve professional engagement in all things, especially in education. PUP makes sure its teachers follow curriculum not their personal agendas. PUP has done this well; their presence for 20 years attests to that.

So, I never told the men how to think; I showed them how to look at things, and always ALWAYS tried to deliver broader context. Teaching history of photo is like teaching history; you wanna talk about Gilles Peress? You’re gonna have to talk about 200 years of Balkan history.

I could lean on the work of others. I’d show them bodies of work of prison photographs or photographs that speak to the issue.

KPA: That’s exactly what I’m wondering: how much you brought in to the curriculum, from the artists and photographers you’ve featured in Prison Photography.

PB: The final paper was to have them write on prison photographs. They had to do three things:

1. to put the issue that the photograph spoke to in context; to do the research, find out the stats, see how California compared to other states, see how other states compared to national levels, all of that. Do a proper bang up research job.

2. to analyze the images.

3. to insert their own personal narrative or personal experience.

KPA: And their subject was one artist’s work, one person who had dealt with the topic of prisons. How did that assignment go?

PB: I think the essays are great. Some of them I will edit and keep them as they are, some of them I will pluck out the best 400 words. The next step is to publish them.

KPA: Who were the photographers and which work of prisons particularly resonated with your students?

PB: Isadora Kosofsky and Jacobia Dahm both of whom did series on family visitation.

KPA: You’ve done a tremendous amount of work with artists, a lot of speaking and writing on the topic of photography and prisons. How does this teaching experience affect your perspective, your priorities, your interests, what you know and understand about that work? Recognizing that it’s a work in progress, that you still have publishing your students’ work ahead of you.

PB: Yes. But in terms of just being in the classroom with these guys, it felt and operated in a way that I anticipated it would. So, it felt good.

I really wanted to go back to teaching, and it felt relevant, and it felt needed. It’s more compelling than writing about the issue certainly. The guys got college credit, that’s what they were there for primarily, before anything else. I feel like I’ve served them in that respect. Now, to get the published writings out will just double the effect. And really honor them because there’s a lot of stuff that they do on the inside, and there’s a lot of hassle to translate it to the outside for an outside public. The experience confirmed what I thought and hoped with the proposal, in teaching history of photography.

KPA: Which was?

PB: Which was to have them think about power, and have them think about photographs as not neutral objects or neutral agents, but as being part of a complex that creates a society. I’ll end with this story. I showed them pictures from the Victorian era — photographs made of infants who had died. And in some cases, parents would prop up their dead baby next to their three older siblings. This particularly interested one student. His brother had been shot dead. His son had been shot dead. He had been to countless funerals throughout his life before he even started his incarceration, which had been going on for 24 years. But he said whenever he went to a funeral it was always his mom or his aunts who were taking pictures of the corpse in the open casket. And he always dismissed it, thought it was a weird behavior, just a stupid thing that your mom does. But then when he saw these Victorian portraits he got to wondering why it was always the women in his family who were making photographs at funerals, and why it was never important to him.

He concluded, that it was women who were the caretakers, and that one might need more of an emotional reckoning with one’s self in order to take those images. He thought the women in his family wanted mementos but could also have been thinking longer term, forward and back, about what ancestry and family is, and how that continues to exist. He wrote a really beautiful essay. He telephoned his mom and his sister, and he included quotes from them about why they took those photographs. So that was a really proud moment for me because he researched and thought about something that he had not reckoned with and something that I had not considered before.

KPA: That’s lovely. Thanks, Pete.

PB: Thank you.