Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, closed in 1970, is now a historic site open for tours.
In a space devoid of stimulation, Stephen most wanted to see a dove. Carlos longed for a rendering of “red sky at sunset off the coast of Southern California.” Tyrone asked for a picture of the present: “myself, age 62, in a cell, yearning for release from 25 years in solitary.”
Photo Requests From Solitary gives people in isolation the views they cannot see. Laurie Jo Reynolds, one of its main organizers, terms the project “legislative art,” which intervenes in politics and policy with the goal of enacting change—in this case, prison and solitary reform. Jeanine Oleson, an interdisciplinary artist, and Jean Casella, co-director of watchdog group Solitary Watch, are the other two leaders of the initiative. The project has been housed online via Solitary Watch since 2013, and has hosted installations at spaces from statehouses to public libraries to historic prisons.
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Jeanine Oleson
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Laurie Jo Reynolds
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Rachel Herman
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Jason Reblando
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Karen Rodriguez
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Greg Ruffing
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Jesse Avina
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Chris Murphy
With the coronavirus crisis leading to more instances of solitary confinement, their work is more urgent than ever. Before the pandemic hit, an estimated 60,000 people were in solitary confinement in state and federal prisons. In April, that number increased fivefold: Nearly 300,000 people are in isolation.
Laurie Jo Reynolds and other organizers started the project while working with people incarcerated at Illinois’s Tamms Correctional Center, commonly known as Tamms Supermax. Organizers wrote to men in the prison and asked what they would most like to see. Their answers varied from close-ups of “J-Lo’s butt” to collages of comic book characters.
Tamms Supermax “was designed for sensory deprivation,” Reynolds told me. “Everyone was in permanent solitary confinement with no phone calls, no contact visits, no communal activities, no religious activities. No communal spaces were even built into the prison at all.” So organizers of the Tamms Year 10 project communicated by letter. After the closure of Tamms Supermax in 2013, Photo Requests From Solitary continued through Solitary Watch and expanded to include prisons around the country.
The sensory-deprivation setup at Tamms and many other prisons traces its history to Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which pioneered the “Philadelphia System”—the genesis of solitary confinement in American prisons. Jails in early America resembled the raucous prisons of a Dickens novel more than the penitent’s cell. But in late-18th-century Philadelphia, a group of Quaker prison reformers piloted a penal strategy based on isolation, which they thought would lead to reflection and eventual enlightenment. The first prison with their radial layout of individual cells, Eastern State Penitentiary, opened its gates in 1829. But prison officials realized that permanent isolation was ineffective at encouraging reflection or decreasing recidivism—not to mention prohibitively expensive—and discontinued the practice in 1913.
But after the state of Pennsylvania closed it in 1970, Eastern State reopened in 1994 as a historic site with educational tours, exhibits educating visitors about mass incarceration, and, sometimes, a haunted house. The hulking Gothic structure designed by John Haviland is juxtaposed with hipster bars and shared townhomes in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood.
And within the prison, Photo Requests From Solitary has set up an installation to remind visitors that despite its historical beginnings, solitary confinement is far from over. When creating the exhibit at Eastern State, Reynolds told me, part of the visual intent was to “merge past and present,” using concrete and steel—“cold, alienating materials”—to call to mind the architectural style of the supermax prisons built in the 20th century.
Facing the whitewashed cells of Eastern State Penitentiary, the must of captivity hangs in the air. In one wing of the prison’s panopticon-style layout, art exhibits about life in modern prisons fill the cells, and down the passageway two cells are dedicated to Photo Requests From Solitary.
The project uses primary documents written by incarcerated people to contextualize and humanize the cold, hard numbers of solitary confinement in the United States. “The eternal challenge of our work is trying to put a human face on policy,” said Sean Kelley, senior vice president at Eastern State. This exhibit has been particularly effective, he told me, because “it will reward five minutes of attention with a very powerful emotional experience.”
And as viewers duck through the narrow cells, they feel that coldness. When I visited, an October rain pinged on the cell’s cramped windows and the intense humidity made it hard to breathe. Hanging on the walls of the first cell, printed copies of inmates’ requests become artifacts in their own right, with sloping handwriting and enough details to immerse visitors in the terrifying daily life of solitary confinement. In the second cell, the effect of the modern technology projecting on a molting, centuries-old wall was a reminder of how far we could have come, if the American penal system had not circled back to the use of solitary.
The effect of engaging with a request and its writer instead of simply observing a photograph is the ultimate point of the project.
After viewing the exhibit, visitors are invited to fulfill a request on their own. The effect of engaging with a request and its writer instead of simply observing a photograph is the ultimate point of the project. As Reynolds told me, when we think about incarcerated people, particularly those in isolation, we “often use the term ‘the worst of the worst,’ or we use the terms ‘super predators,’ ‘crack moms,’ and ‘sex offenders.’ All of these terms essentially help the state justify treatment of people that is a violation of human rights.” But in seeing and filling a request, Reynolds said, “a paradigm shift happens in people’s brains: ‘Oh, right, these are human beings just like me, and they see things, they have memories, they long for things.’”
Jeanine Oleson, an artist and collaborator in the project, appreciates that fulfilling requests pushes viewers out of passive support and into active engagement. In 2011, an inmate in Tamms named Robert requested a photo collage of his mother, who had recently died. He wanted an image of her with a mansion in the background, next to a Hummer, money littering the ground.
Oleson sat down to create the collage on her computer. Making it was simple enough, she recalls. “But there’s something about spending that time thinking about what he wanted, and the humanity in that request.”
Often it’s not the pictures that stick with viewers, but the requests themselves. In 2012, Anthony, writing from solitary in Illinois, requested a photo, writing in loopy, curlicue script that seemed incongruous with the pallor of an isolation cell. On any given day that year, 80,000 inmates sat in solitary confinement in the United States. Anthony was one of them, and his single request was this: “I would like a picture of someone who will write me back and communicate with me. (Like a friend),” he wrote.
