Prison Living

John Vettese sees what develops

by John Vettese

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Anna G. Norton and Johanna Inman dare you to find the beauty and vibrancy in Eastern State Penitentiary.

"Living Space," their collaborative time-lapse photo study housed in Cellblock 9, depicts the penitentiary in bright light and color, a contrast to the stark approach photographers typically take in shooting the site.

"I didn't want to do straightforward black-and-whites of decay," Norton says. "It's obvious, and it's been done many times before."

Given that the prison is 179 years old, decay might seem impossible to avoid. But for Norton, wandering the site on a quiet day in late summer 2007 revealed a way around it.

"I was standing in the doorway of one of the cells, and I happened to notice the light on the wall," she says. "I could actually see it shift, and just over a couple minutes, the scene changed. I was really amazed."

Norton excitedly outlined the project in a proposal for one of Eastern State's installation grants. She wanted to shoot time-lapse still photos that would be stitched together into 60-second movies. The movies would emphasize the solitude in which the prisoners lived, but also the light, and the way it shapes the scene over the course of a day. By the time the project was approved, Inman had come on board (both women got their master's degrees in photography at Tyler School of Art) and location-scouting began.

Except for one study of a cellblock, done in the distant-vanishing-point style ubiquitous in Eastern State photo shoots, "Living Space" presents less-common scenes where decay, when it appears, is incidental.

One movie positions the camera at the back wall of a cell, framing the cell door in the lower third of the image and peering across the hallway into the adjacent cell. The sun shines through the thin rectangular skylight, casting a pyramid shape across the primary cell that shifts from greenish gray to bright white; the cell across the way morphs from rich purple to brilliant amber.

Two other movies look at Cellblock 11, where the back wall is detached; in one, the wall is a weather-stained slab that pulses with eclipsed light before a midday rainstorm, then pops with crosshatched lines at sundown. In the other, the wall has completely fallen away; a lone tree stands in the courtyard, sweeping across the scene in shadow as the sun arcs overhead (pictured, p. 20).

On the surface, the iconic cellblock shot might seem overly familiar — the semicircle ceiling and the endless hallway — but watch as the light juts in through barred windows, then cuts shadows across the floor as the stills cycle through their slide show. Suddenly the common scene seems energized rather than bleak.

Each movie contains about 250 stills, which is heftily edited down from the 350 shots taken per location. Add onto this shoots at several spots that simply didn't pan out, and you're talking a bank of thousands of images needed to create these five movies. But when asked why they didn't attempt video art instead, Norton laughs.

Video would have been too limiting, she says, forcing them to hone in on a specific span of time — using photographs allowed them to pick and choose groups of images from over the course of the day that were most striking. Norton thinks of the result as ambient stills; they may be videos, but they function as still photos since the scene remains static. It's only the environment that's changing.

Because of this, however, the exhibit suffers when viewed as individual photographs. Cycling through the visual time span is necessary to see both the photos and the prison become pulsing and animate, the titular goal of the project.

Says Norton of their installation: "We wanted to show the penitentiary as alive."

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

"Living Space" installation, through Nov. 30, Eastern State Penitentiary, 2027 Fairmount Ave., 215-236-3300, easternstate.org.