Light Work Annual 2012: Amy Elkins

14/38 (Not the Man I Once Was), 2009, Amy Elkins

In each cell an inmate eats, sleeps and pretty much exists for 22½ hours a day. The other 1½ hours you are allowed alone in a small concrete yard with cement walls of about 20 feet high and on top is a metal grate—and through that grate you are offered the only piece of the outside world for anyone that is placed in this environment. The blue sky, unless of course it’s raining.

— Freddy, 36, California

The degree of isolation [Amy Elkins‘] subjects experience is extreme. Of the prisoners that she has written to over the past several years, most have spent their time in a solitary 6 x 9 foot cell. Letters speak of a life where loss is equaled only by the endless time before them…unless the sentence of death is carried out.

— Bill Sullivan, Artist

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

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