This is a project which encompasses my experiences making work in the Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing Kansas. I made three bodies of work there: Marks of Intention, Safe Harbor, and the final piece, Love Notes and Promised Freedom. I began photographing in 2005 choosing to focus on interiors of single occupancy cells. I examined the items collected, purchased and arranged, looking for signs of identity. I was interested in starting a larger conversation about memory, experience, and the ways in which a necessary but flawed institution like a prison affected people. Everything was routine in these men’s lives. Enveloped by distant release dates and behavior reward systems, each day was the same. What I found while working there was lots of wishful thinking. Hoping for letters, filing appeals, etc., they worked to convert a drab and uninteresting life into something better.
Safe Harbor was a program I was introduced to while working in the prison. It was started by a volunteer named Toby Young. She was a cancer survivor and dog lover who was looking to change her life and give it meaning. She chose to partner with Brett Peterson, an assistant warden, to create a program which would rescue dogs from shelters deemed un-adoptable. She would then bring them to the prison and pair them with inmates (trained by her) and live with them in the cells. There they would rehabilitate the dogs and retrain them. Ultimately the dogs could be sent to a inmate’s child or they would be adopted back into the community. This program greatly moved me. In it, I saw hope for something positive in a very dark place. I wanted to make work (or a piece of work) which would celebrate how far so many of the inmates had come personally as well as what they had done for so many of the animals, once considered hopeless. We made the photographs with the help of a grant in 2005. Everyone got a copy of the image of themselves and their dog. The prison framed the prints and hung them up.
The following February I wrote to the prison for installation shots of the photographs we had made the previous summer. The email I got back was hurried.
This is what it said:
“Jeff,
Things are not so good. I can’t talk about it now. Google Toby Young and you will have some idea.
Talk to you soon,
Brett”
I did Google Toby and it turned out that she was missing and so was John Manard, a dog handler in her program. Initially, Toby was considered to be an innocent victim and pleas for her safe return came from her relatives. However, over the next week, details would emerge that would implicate Toby in the escape. She had purchased a truck and hair dye secretly and had withdrawn a large sum of money from her bank account. Everyone who knew her was dumbfounded.
The desire to make the last project, Love Notes and Promised Freedom came from the experience working with the authorities to capture people I had made art with, people I knew. I wanted to respond to the disconnect I witnessed between the actual feelings we, who knew them, had and the articles that the newspapers ran. I felt initially quite guilty for helping end what was ultimately a love story but also proud because I had satisfied and repaid the people working in the prison who trusted me and let me make any work in the first place. I had to explore this role I was playing and began to do so very intuitively.
Initially, I thought I would make work without the participation of the people involved, but quickly I realized how much I wanted to include them. We wrote letters, I took road trips to visit the areas they visited and photograph the places where they were hiding. Lastly, I made them rings: something commemorative and secret all at once.
Love Notes and Promised Freedom will be published by J&L Books with a June 2010 release.