In Spring 2018, Aperture published an issue guest edited by scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood. The issue, entitled “Prison Nation,” was both a literary and photographic reflection of what photography looked like through the eyes of the prison system. Fleetwood, who has explored this through not only her research, but on a firsthand account, refers to this as the shadow archive. Mug shots, pictures of non-citizens and migrants, etc. all fall under the category of the autonomy within the archive. Images that are a part of the shadow archive often strip people of their humanity, not allowing the subjects to choose how to pose, how to dress, and how they desire themselves to be shown. Instead, they are forced to abide by other rules, unable to control their likeness, a violence in its own right.
Fleetwood authors a text in this issue, “Marking Time,” where she reflects on memories of visiting her own family in prison, with photographs alongside them. Much of her research focuses on reclaiming this gaze amongst what she refers to as the “carceral backdrop.” Through these images, she shows how prison studios were an opportunity for inmates to gain back a part of their autonomy. The man shown below is her cousin, Allen, pictured with his daughter and niece during a visit. We see Allen and his family in the makeshift studio, posing in front of pre-printed backdrops of a city skyline and a farmhouse with a lush field. We’re made hyper aware of the artificial environment, the abrupt cut of the backdrop as it makes contact with the drab prison floor. Nonetheless, Allen is allowed to choose how and where he stands, his facial expressions — many of these small decisions being left up to him.
This makeshift studio not only provides autonomy, but a sense of normalcy that both he and his family are being robbed of otherwise. Fleetwood says, “We were raised in a town in Southwest Ohio where Black teens and young Black men are routinely hunted, profiled, beaten, and confined by local police forces. For many, an arrest and jail time seemed inevitable.”1 Accepting incarceration as a part of her own life and others around her speaks to bigger problems, ones that lie within the US prison system, and the cops that fuel it.
Fleetwood shares another image with us, showing Allen, his mother, and herself. She tells us that both Allen and another one of her family members had spent long sentences as teenagers and young adults in Ohio prison. Fleetwood also tells us that the people who ran these photo studios were incarcerated, and their job was to operate them and document these family visits. But the photographs weren't free. Each photograph costs $2, meaning the prisoners couldn't afford them. Although it's more likely that their family could afford to buy them, it's rather a testament to the corruption that runs deep within the system.
Fleetwood’s research isn’t the only iteration of the carceral archive, as she draws parallels to the work of photographer Deana Lawson. In Lawson’s series Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, she collects images of her own family that were in the prison system. The images throughout the series depict her cousin Jazmin, her incarcerated partner Erik, and their young child. Although Lawson has a personal connection with the subjects, the series was later shown at different galleries and amongst many museum walls. What happens when photographs are taken out of a familial context and put into a fine art one, or later, a museum archive?
Mohawk Correctional Facility struggles with the gain and loss of autonomy, as images enter different spaces outside of their intended ones, the narratives can be shifted and twisted. Is it up to the artist to take this responsibility of where these images will exist or is it something that simply can't be helped?
Fleetwood’s focus on the carceral archive extends past her own family, and looks at the greater scope of the documentation of mass incarceration. In her research, more specifically from reviewing The Walther Collection, she comments that these early iterations of mugshots “generate data that accumulates in the production of whiteness.”3 She goes on to mention that many of these images are of poor European immigrants, homeless people, or those that didn't fit into the notions of heterosexuality. Essentially, these people that Fleetwood mentions didn't fit into the typical expectations of whiteness, which is rooted in both gender and class disparities; the language often used to refer to them would use words like “rugged” or “dirty.”
Dating back to 1857, mug shots like these served as some of the first documentation of ways in which challenging the notion of whiteness began to visually other. Being poor, uneducated, being different — meant being less white. All of this began to write the narrative of what whiteness looks like, and how we view it today.
Another lens in which one can view the shadow archive is through photographs of non-citizens and migrants. Lily Cho, an Associate Professor and Associate Dean Global & Community Engagement at York University, is drawn to the idea of what makes a non-citizen. In November 2021, Cho published Mass Capture, a book that looks at Chinese Head Tax photographs, looking for clues of how we view citizenship.
Through this project, Cho began to draw similarities between Chinese migrant workers and Mexican migrant workers, specifically in California. The image below shows migrant workers all holding up white cards, sitting at the same exact place, in the same wooden stool, and the same white backdrop. Each figure becomes nameless, being cataloged though what we call identification photography. The images feel void of emotion, cold and vacant. Although catagorized as such, their identity was rather an afterthought, pushing forth this belief that non-citizens and migrants aren't worth being identified; they're seen as less than. And Cho shares a similar sentiment: “The sheer absence of information in the migrant farmworkers' photographs reveals so much about the technology of non-citizenship and the processes by which non-citizens are made.”4
Looking at other identification cards, and how many more descriptors are given, it's almost as if when you become a citizen, you're being rewarded with an identity, your humanity finally validated. Cho says: “...that these photographs exist at all indicates that there was a process of capture and that it mattered enough for these photographs to have been made.”5
When thinking about ownership of ones self, and regaining bodily autonomy within the archive, it’s a slow but steady effort in working to shift stereotypes that have been forced upon it. Samuel Fosso, Camoroonian born and Nigerian raised photographer, is often cited as one that worked to change the narrative of how people like him were depicted within the archive. At only 13 years old, Fosso learned the medium and opened his own photography studio in Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic. His interest in self-portraiture evolved as he would make images after studio hours to send to his grandmother in Nigeria.6 Over time, he was mesmerized with changing outfits and the way he could alter his appearance. A young Fosso’s obsession with identity carried into his work as an adult, where he continued to explore ways of presenting himself, re-imagining his own identity, taking on many different forms.
Fosso frequently explores gender and sexuality throughout his work. He plays with color, clothing, accessories, backdrops, altering his own appearance how he sees fit, sometimes paying tribute to different figures, either ones he’s known personally, or those he’s inspired by. Fosso said, “That’s how my Tati series (1997) began…Since there were three African photographers, I wanted my project to register a different mood of the African imagination, and not the images that were already associated with African photography. My goal was to take a new direction in my work.”7
Another photographer who challenged the notions of archive, as well as depictions of Black and other people of color within narrative of studio photography is Singarum Jeevaruthnam "Kitty" Moodley. Born in 1922 into an Indian family in South Africa, he started his family-run photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg in his mid 30s. Both an artist and activist during the apartheid-era of South Africa, his studio, dubbed Kitty’s Studio, provided safe space for locals to be photographed in ways which pushed against traditional notions in which they’d be depicted. At the time of the studios run, many of the people who were photographed would also be grouped into categories such as “African,” “Indian,” or “Colored,” all which brought their own culture and style to each session.8
Both Fosso and Moodley’s photographs are a long shot from the typical depictions we’ve been shown of non-white people in vernacular photography. In a world that otherwise prioritizes white, male, straight, cis bodies, it can often be left up to people who have been historically othered to make spaces for themselves. As an alternative to an archive that opresses, the othered have created their own, one that is rewriting historical conventions as we speak. After all, its our mere existence that’s changing history.