Still Lives in Changing Times: Documentary and the American Carceral State, 1964-1980

This thesis analyses the relationship between American documentary and the reorganisation of the carceral apparatus in the United States from 1964 to 1980. Centring on the work of Danny Lyon, Bruce Jackson, and Leonard Freed, this project examines how these photographers used their cameras, as well as the magazine page and the photobook, to investigate the shifting terrain of prisons and policing alongside the civil rights movement and after. Beginning with Bruce Jackson's first foray into the South's prison farms as a young folklorist and ending with the publication of Magnum photographer Leonard Freed's photobook Police Work, this dissertation historicises documentary and its work, probing the ways in which these photographers negotiated the unstable intersection of the museum, the archive, and mass culture that characterised the 1960s and 1970s. By considering the practice and circulation of documentary historically, Still Lives recasts the static categories that are normally employed to write out official histories of photography as dynamic and fluid, challenging prevailing conceptions of documentary as an insufficiently critical mode of photography. Instead, this project argues, these photographers ask us to consider documentary not simply as an act of capturing reality, but rather as a process of mediation––one that compels a reckoning with the American carceral state as always existing within visual representation. This project not only embarks on a reexamination of documentary and its histories, but also undertakes a major reevaluation of American photography and its racial politics. By shifting our focus away from photographs of protest, Still Lives complicates the dominant idea of "civil rights photography" and challenges the discursive boundaries that constitute it. In contrast with more well-known, iconic images of the civil rights movement––ones which figure this era as a moment of rupture with America’s racial caste system––these photographers, I argue, reframe these decades as a moment of transition between modes of subjection. Rather than easily assimilate into a narrative of national progress, in which the civil rights era is positioned as a juncture in which America’s history of racial domination is overcome, these photographs make visible the ways in which, even during the 1960s and after, the circumscribed humanity of the slave was remapped and reinscribed. Moreover, by foregrounding apparatuses of racialisation, as opposed to racialised bodies, this project expands the ways in which race has been examined photographically. In doing so, Still Lives suggests that, in order to understand the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation that persists in our own moment, the networks of capture and control that constitute the American carceral state must be placed at the very centre of our histories of photography