LH: You write that this lack of interaction “minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised”. In what ways can more equitable and empathetic depictions be fostered?
HN: Empathy, and its relationship to sympathy and ethics, were things I often considered while writing Ethical Portraits. The question of ethics is intrinsic to depicting or representing others, just as the power relations between the sitter and the artist steep the history of portraiture.
I found one quote in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (2004) particularly useful in thinking about these issues. She writes, “empathy isn’t just something that happens to us––a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain––it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves”. Jamison proposes that we have a choice about whom and what we feel empathy for. By extension, the images produced of prisons and inmates were made out of choice. And how they are produced, framed, and disseminated all influence a broader societal perception of incarceration.
In terms of the portraits I engage with, in Ethical Portraits, it often wasn’t the images themselves that could foster empathy or function equitably, but the context of their production and intentionality. I was also implicated in this, and I considered how I could present the interviews I conducted as a form of portrait-making. When considering this question of intent, I always returned to Susan Sontag’s philosophy of photography, particularly her observation: “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” There is a cautionary lesson here: it is almost impossible to foster empathy with a person reduced to an object. Empathetic or equitable portraiture is only possible when the photographer intends to humanise, not objectify, the subject.
LH: After listening to This American Life Lock-Up series, where you heard a prisoner describing the lack of variety they’re exposed to, you write: “What struck me most about his comments was how starkly prison-industrial complexes violate the agency of those they detain, limiting prisoners’ ability to connect with each other and the outside world, and most of all, denying any assertion of individual identity.” In what ways can more representational justice help to give incarcerated people back some autonomy over their identity?
HN: The limitations of visibility discussed in the show resonated with the research I was undertaking about the Chelsea Manning case. While in solitary confinement, Manning’s support network commissioned the illustrator Alicia Neal to draw an alternative portrait of her––as the media had continued using her military photograph. Here, a representational justice was achieved because the media could instead circulate an image aligned to Manning’s gender identity. The alternative portrait was necessary due to a misrepresentation, not an absence of imagery.
Yet with Alyse Emdur’s project Prison Landscapes – the subject of chapter five [and images from which also feature above]––the opposite is true. The project brings together 100 photographs collected between 2005 and 2013 of inmates standing in front of painted backdrops in prison visitation rooms. Vivid colours are often used to create each landscape, and they are utopian in composition and tone, offering an alternative to the architectural and psychic constraints of prison. The circulation of these images is often intimate: most are sent to the detainee’s loved ones––to supplement or override, the only other image of them produced while in prison. The landscapes thereby stand against a lack of visibility. But also resist the participants being coded only as inmates — so the pursuit of representational justice, and a sense of autonomy, in opposition to an institutionalised portrait that offers no alternative representation.