MARGARET STRATTON

DETAINED IN PURGATORY
Photographs by Margaret Stratton

January 16 - March 18, 2001
Contact Sheet 110


In 1994 photographer and video artist Margaret Stratton began photographing abandoned prisons as a means of addressing some of the issues surrounding the brutality of incarceration. Rather than documentin
g operational facilities, Stratton chose to examine abandoned and forlorn institutions. Presented in this exhibition are images created at Alcatraz Island, Eastern State Penitentiary, Montana Territorial Prison, Ellis Island, and the Jamesville Penitentiary (which was demolished only a few months after Stratton photographed it while in residence at Light Work in 1998).

Stratton's images of abandoned institutions are imbued with the signs of previous occupation. We do not know who was there or what circumstances led them to be there, but we are left to imagine the horrors they might have encountered. As Stratton suggests in her artist statement, "It is the idea of prison that interests us, not the actual place itself."

Hospital Ward
Eastern State Penitentiary
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The images question the function of these places of confinement and challenge our own basic humanity and empathy for their occupants. Through these photographs of abandoned institutions, Stratton leaves us to reflect on the fates of the souls who have passed though these institutions, and ponder the severity and duration of their time spent in purgatory.