How can photography be used to rehabilitate in prisons?

“Prison changes everything. This is what people who have done time understand,” writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet, lawyer, memoirist and teacher in the foreword of The San Quentin Project, a new book published by Aperture. As a formally incarcerated person, Reginald is privy to the fact. He understands that any interaction with the prison system, be it positive or negative, leaves an imprint. It’s something artist and professor of photography Nigel Poor understands too, but from a different perspective, as collaborating with incarcerated people has been a large focus of her work since she first began volunteering at San Quentin State Prison in 2011. 

Through a series of photography classes, a podcast called Ear Hustle which she co-hosts with Earlonne Woods and produces alongside a team inside the prison, and now through The San Quentin Project, Nigel opens a window into the lives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and their families, for those who are lucky enough to not have come into contact with the prison system.

“I really want people to understand what happens in prison,” Nigel says. “And the question there is, should they exist? And if they have to exist, how should they exist? I want people to care about those who are incarcerated. And the only way you can care about somebody is to see a connection to them, you have to have empathy.” She continues that, in the United States at least, prisons are paid for by taxes. “We are in some ways responsible for prisons because we pay for them every year.” Nigel therefore creates space for (mostly) men and (some) women (San Quentin is a men’s facility) to tell their stories and urges the rest of us to listen – including herself. Crucially, she does this using the arts – primarily photography – a medium she values as a “bridge for conversations”. She uses the art form to engage us all, to unveil the humanity behind strife and at times unimaginable crimes and, subtly, she uncovers the importance of arts education as a means of rehabilitation. 

For the first few years, she focussed on teaching a history of photography class, trying to figure out how she could replicate the process of image-making in a prison where she was not allowed to bring cameras. “I really wanted students to understand how they connect to the images and how they can find themselves within the image – it’s not just learning names and dates and stuff like that,” she explains. In turn, she developed an exercise called The Verbal Photograph, in which she prompted her students to pick a memory and distil it into a photograph in their mind, then express it in writing as if they were looking at that photograph. “The writing they used was so invitational,” she explains, “it was an invitation to an experience.”

Subsequently, she developed The San Quentin Mapping Exercise as a means to further this idea of placing yourself into an image, but this time with printouts of photographs by William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, David Hilliard, Joel Sternfeld, and Stephen Shore and more. She asked students to analyse the images and jot notations in the margin of the page to pull out anything they noticed: light and shadow, objects, framing etc. Then, they were asked to push that idea further – to create a fictional narrative, written from any perspective that tells the story of what is happening in the image. The results were astounding and very quickly, she began having “such amazing conversations about photography and about the mens’ experiences looking at the photographs” – it was clear there was an inherent interest in, and need for, the subject inside the prison. 

For Nigel, the work she was doing inside San Quentin took on a whole new context in 2012 when Lieutenant Sam Robinson (yes, Ear Hustle fans, THE Lieutenant Sam Robinson) handed her a box. Nigel was stopping by his office as she always did on her way to class one day when Lieutenant Robinson fished it out from under his desk. “His office is chaos,” Nigel jokes. “There’s so much stuff in there, it’s unbelievable. His desk is literally piled with letters and stuff.” In the box were thousands of four by five, black and white negatives “and even telling you now, I’m getting emotional about it,” Nigel says, “I knew it was something amazing.” The images had been taken at San Quentin between, roughly, the 1930s and 1980s and, “I have no idea why he did”, but Lieutenant Robinson gave Nigel permission to take the whole box and work with them how she saw fit.