Kodachrome Plantation

Bruce Jackson’s Color Prison Photographs

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12910818
AutoresKimberly Schreiber (autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen15
Número2
Páginas151-169
Fecha de publicación2021-09-17
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPhotography and Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1751-4517 • E-ISSN: 1751-4525
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17514517.2021.1882136
OpenAlexW3199171250
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas12

This article examines the color photographs that were taken by Bruce Jackson at prison farms throughout Texas and Arkansas between 1964 and 1979. It not only asks why Jackson’s photographs have been exclusively published and exhibited in black-and-white, but also explores what might be gained by seeing the prison farm in color. Extending from Sally Stein’s examination of the rhetorical meanings of monochrome and polychrome photography in the interwar context, this article argues that, due to the widespread recirculation of Farm Security Administration photography in public life during the 1960s and after, black-and-white documentary gained a newfound historical authenticity. As a result of their clear resonance with Depression-era photographs of manual, agricultural labor, Jackson’s photographs were drained of color in order to displace the institution onto a remote past. This article claims that, by coding the prison farm as both in and out of time, Jackson’s color photographs upend the way in which we have been made to see the prison farm and, in doing so, produce an alternative history of the 1960s and after––one that fully attends to the ongoing temporality of slavery and its afterlives

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Color photography · Photography · Prison · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Photography and Visual Culture