Side Gallery
Current Exhibition
EXHIBITION OPENING EVENT: SATURDAY 16 JANUARY, 2PM, FREE, ALL WELCOME
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Saturday 16 January - Saturday 13 March 2010
WOMEN IN PRISON
Jane Evelyn Atwood
Visiting rights for couples who are incarcerated at the same time, male and female, in two sections of the same prison. Centre Pénitentiare de Femmes, Metz, France, 1990.
‘People often ask how I could pursue such a “sad” subject for so long. Curiosity was the initial spur. Surprise, shock and bewilderment gradually took over. Rage propelled me along to the end. In the early 1980s I first requested access to prisons in France, but was refused. It was not until 1989 that a chance assignment got me inside. That first, very real, very harsh experience of prison life opened my eyes. I identified with the inmates I met. On many levels they were just like me. But what had happened to them was dramatically different. Of the eighteen women in that first jail, all but one seemed to be incarcerated because of a man - for something he’d done, or something they’d never have done on their own.’ Jane Evelyn Atwood
Jane Evelyn Atwood spent over a decade documenting the lives of women in prison in the USA, across Europe and in India. Her monumental undertaking involved forty prisons in ten different countries, her journey took her to some of world’s worst penitentiaries and to death row. This classic exhibition remains the definitive photographic work on the subject. Her book, Too Much Time: Women in Prison, is published by Phaidon.