Alyse Emdur

Alyse Emdur, Prison Landscapes

Alyse Emdur is the artist I mentioned today that engages prisoners to make her work.

From her project description for Prison Landscapes:

Prison Landscapes is a monumental collection of photographs of prison inmates representing themselves in front of visiting room backdrops. Such backdrops, often painted by talented inmates, are used within the prisons as portrait studios. As inmates and their visitors pose for photos in front of these idealized landscapes they pretend, for a brief moment, that they are someplace else. The photographs are given to these visitors as gifts to take home and remember the faces of their loved ones while they are incarcerated.

Prison Landscapes explores this little known and largely physically inaccessible genre of painting and portraiture seen only by inmates, visitors, and prison employees. Created specifically for escape and self-representation, the idealized paintings of tropical beaches, fantastical waterfalls, mountain vistas, and cityscapes invite sitters to perform fantasies of freedom.

Prison Landscapes offers viewers a rare opportunity to see Americas incarcerated population, not through the usual lens of criminality, but through the eyes of inmates loved ones. The collection was inspired by a photograph I found of myself at age five posing in front of a tropical beach scene while visiting my brother in prison. Since discovering this first portrait in my own family album in 2005, I have invited hundreds of prisoners to send me photographs for inclusion in this collection.

I cant wait to assign roles..this is gunna be us! ^

Well, I'm stoked!

Developing Community Guidelines

This blog is a record of the goings-on of the course Portrait as Community, a special topics course at Virginia Commonwealth University. This course will explore the use of portraiture and techniques for recording personal and cultural histories (such as audio-field recordings and texts) as effective documentary tools. Each student will be required to develop a semester-long multimedia project engaging a definable local community. The course is offered by the Department of Photography and Film and co-taught by Yuki Hibben, Assistant Head, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, and Michael Lease, Head of Exhibitions and Design, Anderson Gallery. 

Both professors and all students will contribute to this blog in an effort to record what is certain to be a unique class. 

Throughout the semester, considerable debate and research will be directed towards ethical questions and concerns surrounding artistic methodologies and practices related to subject interaction, documentation, and representation. To reinforce lectures and class discussions, students will examine photo-based documentary works housed in Cabell Library’s Special Collections and Archives. Students will also learn how to use primary and secondary sources to research their defined communities, documenting their progress in the form of a research portfolio.
 

In hopes of better understanding what it is to be a community, and in order to assist with navigation into, through, and among communities in the Richmond region, the class is treating the classroom, or the space of Pollak Building room 211, as what might best be called an intentional community. In order to do this we as a group are developing community guidelines in hopes of better understanding what it takes to make a community. 

Yesterday was a our second class, we started the class with student presentations from Jaclyn, Casey, and Kate. Following the presentations, and using Robert Putnam's 1996 essay Bowling Alone, we began our discussion what the vision for the community might be. In the next few days we'll refine our vision for our community and post the guidelines here.