Steve Davis: As Regular People
We do judge books by their covers and people by what they wear. Photographer Steve Davis has created a poignant portrait project, As Regular People, photographing inmates in civilian clothing as they prepare for release–this simple shift in dress and self presentation changing how we perceive his subjects. The project mirrors the work that prison staff does to help prepare inmates for release by teaching them how to behave job interviews and other life skills, but the portraits also reflect the potential of another chance and new beginnings. After many e-mails, attending numerous meetings, and organizing clothing drives, Steve finally received the support of the DOC in Olympia, WA to photograph in two prisons.
Steve Davis is a documentary portrait and landscape photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in American Photo, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Russian Esquire, and is in many collections, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House. He is a former 1st place recipient of the Santa Fe CENTER Project Competition, and two time winner of Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowships . Davis is the Coordinator of Photography, media curator and adjunct faculty member of The Evergreen State College. He is represented by the James Harris Gallery, Seattle.
As Regular People
These photographs represent inmates from two corrections facilities in Washington State; the Washington Corrections Center, and the Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women. In these photographs the subjects were offered the opportunity to select civilian clothing. Many of the volunteers in this series wrote a paragraph or two about their intentions upon release. Church, family and committing to a drug-free life were the overarching themes found in almost all of their goals. Each were given prints to keep or give to family, or for use in search of a job. The donated clothes are put to good use, given to the soon to be homeless and needier inmates upon their release.
I do not operate on the thesis that the people who fill our prisons are not regular. Rather, I focus on appearance. Incarcerated men and women are generally seen through media images as institutionalized and dehumanized subjects of a punitive system. Typically, they are more extras than actors in prison, wearing the prison costume; portrayed faceless or as silhouettes in a theater of glass, cinder-block and razor wire.
As we ingest an ever-growing volume of visual information related to incarceration, I hope that images such as mine will serve as a back of the mind, counterbalanced referent, reminding us that prison related pictures (still or moving,) assist in our society’s ease in accepting these men and women as something wholly different than ourselves.
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