A veteran skipper of 37 years, it’s Arthur’s job to look after the boat and crew, and to find the squid. As they haul the catch aboard, there’s often a need for a very different type of jig: a deft move left or right to avoid a blast of ink that the squid can unleash when caught. They jerk hand lines at the end of which are lures with small crowns of barbless hooks, in a process known as jigging. Beneath a string of huge lamps set to attract the squid a dozen or so fishermen are hard at work landing their catch. Though it’s late, the deck is a hive of activity. The Striker fishes for chokka (squid) off the craggy coves and wave-sculpted bays of South Africa’s wild southern coast. Yet, the project also raises the question of whether it’s possible for a prison, even one with programming as progressive as San Quentin’s, to be a dignified place to live.From ashore, it looks like a necklace of stars draped across an inky abyss. It’s not a war zone, which is how I’ve heard guys describe a level 4 prison, where every time you leave your cell you don’t know if you’ll make it back.” (San Quentin is a medium-security, level 2 prison.) “Guys try to transfer to San Quentin from other prisons because of its reputation. Here, there’s yoga classes, a Shakespeare group, meditation groups, a newspaper, radio program, gardening, and cooking classes,” she says. “I do wish more prisons could be like San Quentin, with good programming that had more than AA and NA. The photo was found in an envelope marked ‘Mother’s Day 1976’.
Top: One of Poor’s students, Ruben Ramirez, reimagines this man’s body as a castle and the outstretched arms holding him up as two buttresses.īottom: Shadeed Wallace-Stepter, who has since been released from San Quentin, observes that it’s difficult to discern which man is incarcerated because none of them are in uniform. Other notes are heartfelt and reflective, upending cliches around prison life as necessarily brutal and those incarcerated as one-dimensional individuals. In some cases, the students’ notes read as damning indictments of the prison staff’s cruelty or negligence. Throughout the series, there are clear-eyed observations of panopticon-oriented surveillance methods, including mounted cameras, barbed wire, and gun towers. “I always remember that I can walk out of prison but the people I work with can’t,” Poor says. (On gallery signage, she and her students are equally credited as artists.)
Inspired by the artists Jim Goldberg, Bill Owens, and Sophie Calle, Poor sees the photographs as collaborative projects in which her students’ perspectives are at the focus, while she still plays an active role. In the mapped images, life at San Quentin is shown to be rife with contradictions – quotidian and unusual, peaceable yet marked with violence and trauma. ‘The black-and-white film can’t hide the colors of the mind,’ writes Tindall.
Left: A 1975 image titled Fish Caught at Ranch.
Right: This image from 1966 captures the fall-out from a fight in one of San Quentin’s school buildings. (In the 60s, prisoners weren’t required to wear uniforms in the 50s, an elementary school for prison staff families was almost entirely composed of white children.) Presented without context, the diagrammed images are time capsules that chart how the culture of San Quentin has evolved from the 60s to the present. Adding poetic musings, facts and speculative theories to the works, the students interpreted a range of scenes – from visiting-room weddings and ice sculpture-carving contests to family visits and attempted escapes. In a photography course that she still teaches through the not-for-profit initiative Prison University Project, Poor engaged her students – incarcerated at San Quentin – with visual mapping exercises encouraging them to write and draw directly on to the found photos. Mesro Coles-El, another of Poor’s students, selected this photo of a man in Native American costume – adding his own questions about the event, cultural tradition, and intended audience for the ritual.
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