It’s now 36 years since Jane Evelyn Atwood first went to prison. “It wasn’t pleasant. It was fascinating. Painful, exhausting, but vital,” she told Blind magazine last year. “The 10 years I spent in prisons were the best of my life.”
From 1989, the American photographer spent a decade recording life behind bars in 40 women’s jails across the US, western Europe and Russia. Her black and white images are unsparing and deeply human, surfacing the repetitive strains of a repetitive existence: petty humiliations, a very deliberate absence of care and – despite it all – the ability to find moments of connection and hope in the shadows.
‘Hog’ worked in an auto-body shop for incarcerated women and described herself as ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body.’ Central California women’s facility, Chowchilla, 1995.
A prisoner in solitary confinement to protect her from ‘water intoxication’ – a syndrome where the person drinks water until they drown. She was allegedly sexually abused by guards while she was locked up for her own safety. Meadow Creek Correctional Center, Eagle River, Alaska, 1993.
Visiting rights for a married couple jailed for stealing a painting from a museum. Maison d’Arret de Femmes de Dijon, 1991.
Prisoner in the prison workshop, Centre Pénitentiaire Les Baumettes, Marseille, France, 1991.
All Images: Jane Evelyn Atwood
“Initially, curiosity was my main motive,” she has said. “Surprise, shock and amazement took over. Then the rage carried me to the end. From the beginning, I was struck by the prisoners’ immense emotional lack. They were handicapped in many ways. They had been crushed not only by ignorance, poverty and a shattered family life, which are common to most prisoners, but also by years – if not a lifetime – of physical and sexual abuse by men.”
A New Yorker who has lived in France since 1971, Atwood’s project began when she was commissioned to take photographs inside three women’s prisons for a French Ministry of Justice exhibition commemorating the bicentennial of the 1789 revolution. One image, of a pregnant prisoner in Alaska who had been handcuffed to her delivery table, brought change: after a campaign by Amnesty International, the practice was banned in Britain and in seven US states.
The images were collected in a book, Too Much Time in 2000, which was republished in 2024. In March, they are coming to the Photographer’s Gallery in London’s Soho as part of the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition, which this year also celebrates work by Weronika Gęsicka, Amak Mahmoodian and Rene Matić.
Even after a quarter of a century, these pictures feel horribly current. Since they were taken, the global female prison population has grown by between 50 and 60%. Meanwhile, despite the Labour government’s declaration that fewer women will now go to jail, there are around 3,500 women in prisons in England and Wales, many trapped in the same cycles of abuse, poor mental health and regular returns to custody identified by Atwood all those years ago.
A handcuffed, pregnant inmate writhes in pain during gynaecological examination, moments before she gave birth by caesarean. Two armed guards were posted outside the open door to her hospital room. Providence City Hospital, Anchorage, Alaska, 1993.
The first women’s chain gang in the United States, Maricopa County Jail, Phoenix, Arizona, 1997.
All Images: Jane Evelyn Atwood
No wonder that she told Blind that these images were “a bomb… that must explode in other generations.”
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition runs from March 6 to June 7 at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. A special talk with Jane Evelyn Atwood is held at the gallery on May 12.
