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Many of the photographs look ordinary.
A man winds up on a pitcher’s mound. Another man sprawls on a lawn, smiling, a baby in his lap.
Others depict darker scenes.
One photo showing a man propped up by two others, his bare back and a crescent of blood around his neck exposed, is labeled “Stabbing in Gym.”
[Read about an art exhibition in Los Angeles that explores love and intimacy while incarcerated.]
“Taken as purely documentary of events inside the prison, they’re fascinating,” said Nigel Poor, a San Francisco-based artist who put together “The San Quentin Project,” which opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum earlier this year. “In an art context, they’re an opening for people to insert themselves.”
Ms. Poor told me recently that she started volunteering at San Quentin in 2011, teaching a class about the history of photography.
[Read more about Ms. Poor’s work at San Quentin, including as co-host of the Ear Hustle podcast, here.]
The following year, she said, she learned about an archive of photographs taken at San Quentin, the state’s oldest prison. She got permission to start scanning and archiving the images, which were annotated poorly or not at all.
That turned into a collaborative storytelling project, in which she asked inmates to interpret the images, taken by corrections officers starting in the late-1930s and stretching to the 1970s.
The experiences of the men she worked with, Ms. Poor said, added context and their perspectives added meaning.
She recalled how one of the men working on the project looked at the image marked “Stabbing in Gym,” and saw a body “like a fallen cathedral.”
The two arms, representing the forces of good and evil, buttressed the stabbed man.
“I love that he thought about the body as architecture,” Ms. Poor said. “It was such a poetic way to look at what to most people is this horrifying image.”
Mesro Coles-El, an artist incarcerated at San Quentin under the state’s three strikes law who worked with Ms. Poor, said his favorite photograph was the one showing the man sitting with a child.
It was labeled “Mother’s Day 5-9-76.”
“I love this photograph because it denotes fatherhood and its importance,” Mr. Coles-El, 40, wrote in response to emailed questions. “Even in prison, fatherhood is vital to the sanity of some of the men here.”
Being able to contribute to the history of San Quentin, Mr. Coles-El wrote, was rewarding, as well as challenging.
He wrote that even as a graffiti artist, he found physically writing on the photos themselves — rather than, say, writing separate captions — to be an “aesthetic problem,” so he stuck with photos printed with wide borders.
Mr. Coles-El wrote that he hopes visitors to the exhibition will see San Quentin as a place where life continues — a place where, “people, both free and incarcerated, can work together to change what people think and feel about rehabilitation.”
The exhibition’s viewers may come in imagining San Quentin inmates as a faceless mass, but he hopes they leave seeing them as more human.
“We have faces, too,” he wrote.
“The San Quentin Project” is on view until Nov. 17.
Here’s what you may have missed over the weekend
We often link to sites that limit access for nonsubscribers. We appreciate your reading Times coverage, but we also encourage you to support local news if you can.
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At the Toronto International Film Festival, where many an Oscar campaign has been born, the buzz has already begun for Jennifer Lopez in “Hustlers.” (It would, believe it or not, be her first Oscar.) [The New York Times]
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There is not a single lesbian bar in the city of Los Angeles. But the women running the Fingerjoint, a pop-up bar, are hoping to reverse the tide. [Eater]
Also, if you missed it, read about how San Francisco’s queer communities are carving out spaces in a changing city. [The New York Times]
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The Freshwater Pro, a surf contest expected to draw big names, will return to Lemoore this week. Yes, that’s the Central Valley. And yes, it’s real surfing. [The Fresno Bee]
California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected]. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.
Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
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