Pete Brook: On thinking about images
In this episode, we talk with Pete Brook about images of incarceration, and his thoughts on photo ethics more broadly. He shares how he first came to learn about mass incarceration, and why he felt so passionately about the issue. He discusses his belief in the importance of formal education on visual culture, and his experience teaching both university students and men incarcerated at San Quentin Prison. From this experience, Pete describes some of the responses he received from prisoners themselves on prison photography.
What you’ll find inside:
“A visual literacy is imperative and a visual literacy should have a major part in any photo education.” (6:05)
“When I emphasise visual literacy, it’s because in my classrooms I want to talk about Gregory Crewdson, I want to talk about Nan Goldin. But I also want to talk about the memes that flashed up on everyone’s phones yesterday.” (7:00)
“I’m always trying to coach my students into thinking about the ethics of image making. I ask them to think about everything that’s outside of the frame. The obvious questions: who’s taking the picture? How did they get there? How long can you assess they maybe stayed there? Do you think they should have been there?” (11:40)
On the work of Tōyō Miyatake and Jack Iwata, photographers who were interred at the Japanese Internment Camps of Manzanar and Tule Lake: “I’ve just learnt about this new photographer who was also interred and actually photographed two of the camps, not just one. And so I left my students with a question: Why is it that Jack Iwata’s name is only just becoming known? ... Why is it that one biography, one narrative is repeated and pedestaled, and others are not?” (12:35)
On photography archives: “There is always space to invite people to bring their own photographs and add vernacular photographs of the moment to the historical moment that the archive wants to speak to.” (16:30)
“Photography and colonialism sort of ran hand in hand. Their inventions came about at about the same time, and have really suited one another.” (19:27)
“We need to go past the dominant, simple, obvious tropes which seem to stand in for a ‘depiction’ of prison.” (24:38)
On the responses of incarcerated men to photographs of incarceration (26:47)
What does photo ethics mean to Pete?
“A few months ago I initiated a discussion with some other photo educators - it’s online - and the premise was about fear, and it was my fear. And thankfully they talked me down. But when I think of photography ethics I think of talking about and sharing images in a way that helps people know the world better. And my fear is that images, more and more, are causing alienation, causing confusion, especially amongst young people. And going back to what we said at the very start about visual literacy, you can take any image, it doesn’t have to be an image of blight or plight elsewhere in the world. You can talk about the ethics around an Instagram story, you can talk about the ethics of those platforms, you know, which are now increasingly algorithmically run. And, I don’t know whether this fits your vision of ethics but … we have to do work, right? We’re the consumers, and if you’re not thinking about images in a way where you want them to improve society, then you might be inadvertently becoming part of the problem. And my fear is that our current image culture … is that it’s too much work for people to do. Or worse than that, they don’t even see the work that needs to be done.” (41:28)
Links
Born and raised in England, but based in the San Francisco bay area, Pete Brook is an independent writer, curator, educator and prison reform activist. His website, Prison Photography, is a resource that centres around the role photography plays in representing prisons and incarceration. Pete has curated a number of exhibitions including Prison Obscura which presented vernacular forms of photography such as surveillance images and prisoner-made photographs on the topic of incarceration. His work has been featured by the British Journal of Photography, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. In 2018, Pete received the W. Eugene Smith Fund’s Howard Chapnick award, and Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting grant.
You can see his work at https://prisonphotography.org/
This podcast is supported by the Rebecca Vassie Trust, a UK-based charity which promotes the art of narrative photography through granting bursary awards to up-and-coming photographers, and funding public education projects like this one. This podcast has full editorial independence, and the views expressed in this series are not necessarily those of the Trust.