"Community in Action": Incarceration and Self-Representation in the 1970s

In 1970, the Floating Foundation of Photography in New York City (hereafter FFP), dispatched photographers to Sing Sing prison to train inmates in using photographic media. The program’s emphases align it with a range of concurrent pedagogical initiatives—operating on reservations, in ghettoes, and in institutions for the disabled—which sought to instruct marginalized populations in self-representation via photography. The FFP opened similar workshops at other prisons besides Sing Sing, issuing three photobooks from the pictures its students made. While its therapeutic and rehabilitative purposes may smack of complicity with penal authorities, the FFP’s program moved in a different direction. Drawing on then cutting-edge approaches in “milieu therapy,” the FFP and its students aimed for a therapeutic intervention, not on the putatively damaged psyches of individual prisoners, but rather on the institution of the prison itself, intervening in the social dynamics of the prison population—both guards and inmates—to create a “community in action.” Such a community entailed a new mode of sociability that would supplant the damaging and punitive milieu of carceral institutions. Strikingly, in realizing this end, what mattered most to the FFP and its students was not primarily the visual content of photographs, but rather the dynamics of exchange and reciprocity that photographic work could occasion, the social relations that circulated in the vicinity of the medium. For this reason, FFP-sponsored work participated in a broader 1970s trend in art photography, looking away from the image itself to what happened around it and because of it.