San Quentin State Prison from the Inside Out

Poor has been collaborating with residents at San Quentin since 2011, where she teaches classes on visual literacy and photography. For this exhibition, previously unseen images from the prison’s archives are used as the basis for “mapping exercises.” In this process, the artists annotate the photographs, breaking down the images into smaller parts, identifying the visual elements as well as the stories and memories that they bring up.

What results in an unusual kind of portrait, different from the mugshot-like images of men and women in orange jumpsuits we typically see. An image of the subject themselves is often absent from Poor’s portraits. Instead, we learn about them through their own words, following their train of thought, and constructing our image of them through their stories and the connections they’ve made to a photograph.

This offers an alternative to way prisoner’s stories are usually told: through the mainstream media. Whether it’s television, movies, or the news, representation of incarcerated life rarely includes the unmediated voices of the imprisoned themselves.

Poor has been so moved by the stories she has heard through this project that she launched the Ear Hustle podcast with co-creator Earlonne Woods in 2017. Ear Hustle explores “the daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.” The podcast has won multiple awards and was a Peabody Award nominee in 2017 and 2018. With listeners around the world, Ear Hustle has been downloaded more than 20 million times. The exhibition at BAMPFA features listening stations, giving visitors greater context to the visual works.

Throughout her work, Poor has explored and expanded what makes up portraiture. In various projects, she has used fingerprints, hair, trash, and other unusual remnants to compile records of lives lived. Using these little clues, in her work Poor finds new ways to document our experiences, as well as investigating the ways in which we document our own existences. Through The San Quentin Project, Poor is challenging the tradition of who gets to participate in portraiture, a genre that was once reserved almost exclusively for the very elite.

The San Quentin Project is in no way simple: it sheds light on the complicated history of the prison and its inmates, all while pushing the boundaries of what we call portraiture. This complexity, its insights and unanswered questions, offer a nuanced treatment that these stories don’t often get, and it’s a refreshing one. 

The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through November 17, 2019.