Jane Evelyn Atwood began photographing in women’s prisons in 1989, and the work consumed her for a decade. She visited 40 institutions across the US and Europe, in Israel and the former Soviet Union collecting images and first-hand stories from inmates in the most comprehensive project of its kind. Her prison book was called Too Much Time, a title that might equally have referred to her own obsessive immersion in the subject and to the lives of the people she photographed. In her introduction she wrote: “People often ask how I could pursue such a ‘sad’ subject for so long. Curiosity was the initial spur. Surprise, shock and bewilderment gradually took over. Rage propelled me along the road.”
Many of Atwood’s pictures, revisited in a new exhibition, are harrowing; some helped to change the world. (Her image of a woman giving birth in handcuffs in an Alaska jail sparked an international campaign to ban that barbaric practice. The UK ended the practice in 1997; a federal law in the US eventually followed though shackling remains widespread.) Taken together, Atwood’s images are a testament to her determination to provide a full inside story.
