Pictures from a Drawer

For more than forty years, Bruce Jackson has been documenting-in books, photographs, audio recording and film-inmates' lives in American prisons. In November 1975, he acquired a collection of old ID photos while he was visiting the Cummins Unit, a state prison farm in Arkansas. They are published together for the first time in this remarkable book. The 121 images that appear here were likely taken between 1915-1940. As Jackson describes in an absorbing introduction, the function of these photos was not portraiture- their function was to &quote;fold a person into the controlled space of a dossier.&quote; Here, freed from their prison &quote;jackets&quote; and printed at sizes far larger than their originals, these one-time ID photos have now become portraits. Jackson's restoration transforms what were small bureaucratic artifacts into moving images of real men and women. Pictures from a Drawer also contains an extraordinary description of everyday life at Cummins prison in the 1950s, written originally by hand and presented to Jackson in 1973 by its author, a longtime inmate.