Jack Lueders-Booth’s Counter-Archive of Carcerality

In one of Jack Lueders-Booth’s four-by-five-inch color Polaroids taken at Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham (MCI-Framingham) in 1981, a Black woman who went by the name China Doll looks up from applying makeup in a handheld mirror. A hint of surprise washes over her face, but she is clearly posing for the camera. Wearing a turquoise jumpsuit that matches her eyeshadow, she perches sideways on a chair, her feet in open-toed heels crossed on its seat. To contemporary viewers, the cozy boudoir she created looks more like a college dormitory room than a prison cell. On the back wall hang several cards, and she is flanked by a desk with a radio, as well as a shelf holding a trophy, nail polish bottles, a hair straightening iron, and a Valentine’s Day heart-shaped chocolate box, on top of which rests a barely visible photo. Also displayed is Lueders-Booth’s black-and-white portrait of her striking a pose in the lobby of the prison. She had placed the print, taken less than a year before, in a golden frame and put a small Snoopy sticker on the glass’s surface. The displayed pictures highlight one of photography’s important features, especially within this arena of unfreedom: the capacity to construct a world that conjures family, friends, and loved ones—as well as glamorous and resilient versions of oneself.From 1978 to 1985, Lueders-Booth’s photography program at MCI-Framingham taught incarcerated women and men the magic of the darkroom, giving them the opportunity to produce and circulate prints with each other and with loved ones in and outside the prison. His original plan did not involve photographing at the prison himself, but after getting to know his students over the course of the first year, taking portraits and documenting everyday scenes of incarcerated life became a crucial part of his own artistic practice. He also developed an oral history interview project. China Doll was one of his students and most frequent subjects. “I wish to pursue modeling and acting,” she told Lueders-Booth in her oral history interview. “I did modeling in our high school. I even did it in elementary school, and I was always into drama. Always.”1 She developed an obsession with photography through the years of instruction with Lueders-Booth. This is most perfectly captured in one portrait, taken in a different corner of her cell, in which she shows off a wall crowded with cameras cut out from photography advertisements in magazines. This shrine to the medium makes clear her adoration of taking and appearing in pictures, even though the advertised camera models were unavailable at MCI-Framingham.In recent years, artistic production under conditions of captivity has received greater attention largely thanks to Nicole R. Fleetwood’s path-making work. Her book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration as well as her traveling exhibition of the same name (both 2020) offer an essential guide to carceral aesthetics, defined as “a range of relational art practices among incarcerated people, between incarcerated people and nonincarcerated artists, and increasingly among socially engaged artists who use art to address the carceral state.”2 Photography is a key interest for Fleetwood because of how the state has long utilized the medium to designate, index, and dehumanize imprisoned people. Numerous nonincarcerated photographers have also pursued documentary studies of captive life that variously perpetuate and reject the state’s overdetermined tropes. Despite their variability and the uneven conditions of participation, Fleetwood notes that sometimes such “photo projects have the capacity to forge new sets of relations and ways of looking that can challenge carceral visuality.”3In Marking Time, Fleetwood emphasizes the historical rarity and significance of photo educational programs at prisons, which, she posits, can enable incarcerated people to use “a technology that is overwhelmingly meant to surveil and punish them as an alternative practice to provide images from the perspective of the punished and stigmatized.”4 Although this book does not mention Lueders-Booth’s teaching and photographing at MCI-Framingham, Fleetwood edited Aperture’s 2018 “Prison Nation” issue, which featured a spread of his color Polaroids alongside an introduction to his photos by Christie Thompson of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice. This publication coincided with the Aperture Foundation’s traveling exhibition of the same name that included this body of work by Lueders-Booth. In 2024, Lueders-Booth also published Women Prisoner Polaroids, a photobook that presents thirty-two color portraits from 1980 and 1981, as well as transcriptions of selected oral history interviews conducted by the artist in the early 1980s. His eleven oral history interviews did not have a direct relationship to his photos, except for the fact that they sometimes represented the same individuals.Although these recent projects have brought new awareness to Lueders-Booth’s work at MCI-Framingham, the focus has been on a relatively small number of his photos taken during a short period. Because the women appear as subjects in these photos, one might not realize that many of these women and dozens of others were also participating in an educational program and taking pictures themselves. So far, the reemergence of Lueders-Booth’s work at MCI-Framingham has not made legible the fullness of this multiphasal, multiform, improvised community project of about eight years’ duration. In writing this essay, we have struggled to find the right language for what Lueders-Booth and his students created and took part in together, as terms such as “project,” “series,” “body of work,” and “program” fail to encapsulate the specificity of these efforts and social relations.Today, however, it is best grasped as an archive. Lueders-Booth, now ninety, has always kept his materials from MCI-Framingham at his Cambridge studio. It is a large archive that contains, in no particular order: his prints, contact sheets, and negatives as well as a small selection of his students’ unclaimed black-and-white Polaroid negatives; class attendance sheets and syllabi; research materials on the history of MCI-Framingham, prison arts programs, and criminality; correspondence with institutions; correspondence with lawyers related to his serving as character witnesses for students; attempted correspondence with formerly imprisoned people; publications featuring creative work by incarcerated women; materials related to staff experience; more than ten hours of recorded oral history interviews; recordings of singing, church services, and poem recitations; consent and release forms confirming subjects’ participation; press clippings related to his own exhibition and publication of his photographs; and photobook dummies. There is also a box of prints labeled “not to be published,” as requested by the sitters depicted in stored images. All materials are organized in boxes by size and format, and Lueders-Booth’s studio has digitized his negatives and prints. At present, there is no plan for this archive to be acquired by an institution that might care for and make accessible these materials for the decades to come.Extending beyond Lueders-Booth’s own photographic practice, this collection is a polyvocal archive that runs counter to carceral archives, which, according to archivist Tonia Sutherland, operate in the service of the carceral state. As Sutherland postulates, “the most important impact of carceral archives is the justifications for oppression that are codified, reinscribed, and reinforced in these spaces, from carceral records and recordkeeping practices to the narratives that emerge from them.”5 Anthropologist Damien Sojoyner similarly theorizes the “carceral archival project…as a constitutive difference-making generator that bifurcates between life and nonlife or…between human and nonhuman.”6 While not advancing an activist or abolitionist project, Lueders-Booth’s archive insists on the dignity of human life, thus differing from, for example, the institutional records of MCI-Framingham that are now housed at the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. Lueders-Booth did not work for, represent, or act on behalf of the commonwealth, and it is extraordinary that he had the foresight to create and steward this archive for nearly fifty years. Unlike official records that reinforce dehumanizing penal profiles, many materials from Lueders-Booth’s collection shine light on how imprisoned women formed meaningful relationships, found community, and expressed themselves. While these individuals usually kept their own pictures and negatives, as well as the prints in which they appear, many of Lueders-Booth’s materials would have probably been lost to history had he not held onto them. They would not have been suitable for the Massachusetts Archives, and neither the incarcerated women nor those who had been released would have been able to house this full collection.To further situate his archive, one might look to how it has affinities with a compendium of prison letters written by three generations of incarcerated and nonincarcerated women, discussed in an ethnographic study by anthropologist Angela Garcia. “Inscribed with counterdiscourses,” she writes, “the archive may open up the possibility of new historical narratives and modes of subjectivity that are not reducible to the power of the state.”7 Influenced by Garcia’s theorization, we approach Lueders-Booth’s archive as a counter-archive of carcerality, one that challenges and undermines the narratives perpetuated by repositories such as the Massachusetts Archives. As art historian Amin Alsaden proposes, the “counter-archive asks how divergent, bottom-up, and nonhierarchical archives can be created, and what kind of narratives can be told through a closer alignment with the protagonists and their grassroots culture.”8 While Lueders-Booth is a White, middle-class, heterosexual man who never experienced being incarcerated, and whose presence as instructor, photographer, and archivist certainly pervades these materials, this counter-archive is valuable because it vividly resurfaces so many images and testimonies of captive existence. Besides providing a more comprehensive history of Lueders-Booth’s work at MCI-Framingham, we excavate his counter-archive to illuminate the experiences of a few women whose stories can teach us a great deal about the carceral system and community documentary practices in the 1970s and ’80s.The history of photography educational programs at prisons has yet to be written. Even historian Lee Bernstein’s outstanding book America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (2010), which covers the rise and fall of writing, theater, and visual art programs, does not once mention photography. Among the medium’s earliest educational initiatives was the Floating Foundation for Photography, a nonprofit founded on a houseboat in 1971 that had programs at a few prisons across New York State. In 1969, the nonprofit Massachusetts Prison Art Project was launched to bring arts education to incarcerated people, and by 1974, there were professionally led workshops and classes in writing, printing, graphic arts, and photography at state prisons in Walpole, Norfolk, Concord, and Framingham.9 While MCI-Framingham lacked a photo program until Lueders-Booth was hired to develop one through the Prison Art Project, the institution had a longstanding profile of unusually robust course offerings, ranging from dressmaking to playwriting, from parenting to woodcarving, and from gymnastics to current affairs, going back to the 1930s.MCI-Framingham, originally called the Sherborn Reformatory for Women, opened in a western suburb of Boston in 1877. It was the second prison for women in the United States and is the oldest still in operation. MCI-Framingham has a unique history of carceral reform because of the policies, surprisingly progressive for the early twentieth century, developed by Miriam Van Waters. During her tenure as superintendent from 1932 to 1957, she ensured that incarcerated women had access to better education, counseling, healthcare, and work opportunities. Neither the incarcerated individuals nor the correctional officers wore uniforms—a phenomenon that suggested more of an equal power dynamic, and that continued to prevail, as Lueders-Booth’s pictures demonstrate, into the 1980s. In 1955, Van Waters even advocated for prison abolition in a radio broadcast titled “Should All Penal Systems Be Abolished?”10 By the late 1970s, MCI-Framingham had less of a commitment to prison reform; after all, this came at a on was across the of By The that there were women and men in the in MCI-Framingham became for about a holding a small number of men as they the of one for this was to among the women, who not had Because the men were in for Lueders-Booth did not to know them as well as the thus did not them as it was the Prison Art Project that led Lueders-Booth to By the opportunity he was the photo and teaching photography at the for the Arts at years Lueders-Booth, a man in his had a in the for a at to more on photography. of his first projects was a documentary in the early 1970s at being by the of to this Lueders-Booth to its individuals with once a for The in teaching photography at of such as and Lueders-Booth, who had never an that were to be an so he of with his of teaching at of Lueders-Booth had a a teaching in at the who had been with the Prison Art Project, told about the at the of Lueders-Booth, by his a in the into three light the and a studio The class in the of the program the interest of about people, there were so Lueders-Booth conducted an The materials, and up to and In the early years of the the Polaroid Foundation several Polaroid students to make prints and students in the and prison with the except the and The was the same as the one Lueders-Booth was teaching at except for the like which he for students at MCI-Framingham As he to the of in 1981, of the photography by on a creative with the work of of the first year, the class with her As she presence as a woman who was about the same as many of these might have middle-class, from or even of these women who had to at the of such the class was a as well as a for students and no one who about in with a out of the and going into a and out with a Lueders-Booth the program was originally to one year, and his was to the was so that Lueders-Booth continued teaching for more years. the classes became less and he would or workshops with the most students such as a woman who once with her in the lobby of the in a by an photographer, Lueders-Booth also holding a from in one a in the There is a on her face, a out of her The an of and between their different most of his first year at MCI-Framingham, Lueders-Booth did not his In to his own artistic practice, he had to be with documentary and was most by the color work of and this his students to their in their As he that they to and I made to they would for the from the best of their own to look like who they they or who they were in many always made to prints to the who like China or them up in their In his archive, there are notes from women the size and of prints they All such photos became an of to friends, and and outside in of and Lueders-Booth’s portraits were by his subjects’ and example, a woman who went by the name of one of Lueders-Booth’s first students and teaching a a had a of an During a to she had and cut up her that she might be in the she had Lueders-Booth to her large A she would the of her even these were to one she might be able to it to a to a In the Lueders-Booth back her with her The of her with the of This is not she to it is state might have the as a of a to a it is also an of than a of and in the of Lueders-Booth’s educational program and portrait had and this from formed over years. In the corner of the there is a Polaroid of Lueders-Booth and posing in a during a The of this Polaroid emphasizes the significance of not the photo program in her life, but also her relationship with her of brought about requested in a different one Lueders-Booth to a photo of her She to a to her nonincarcerated during to the of their this of was outside what was not to mention and within a prison were to find have in and the program might have been at of his as well as the dynamic, the asks Lueders-Booth to through with taking the They the to the and took the in his which was a cell. he her a and the not the of these I Lueders-Booth once on one of the to release the the the women and or they so they are as as the of how this out as as I more his about the across this archive, it especially to those pictures by the woman who and for they had a that the of Lueders-Booth his but as others their portraits so he took their pictures in a of and of and even in dozens of photos, from a portrait of women with to a of a each In many it is to these women are or friends, and Lueders-Booth did not know the relationship of his subjects. photo shows Black and a The her from as their right and they look with the camera. A of this to the of in the of the carceral relational to the Lueders-Booth was by prison to make staff and pictures to Because of a relationship with correctional officers and other through these he was access at so he of captive life that a visual high and in and incarcerated individuals He also photographing scenes of and such as a of a in a at or an of to with As with other Lueders-Booth would prints to those individuals being as of their developed an that the of the penal system into the community, Lueders-Booth sometimes took photos related to this project outside MCI-Framingham, but there was always a it back to the prison. example, a to her in he took pictures of an incarcerated he had on at their was the in from his It was as he was these on behalf of his students; these pictures had the to by the more Lueders-Booth also a formerly imprisoned with her at a in Despite being in his archive, these Lueders-Booth’s attention to the of carceral beyond the the early Lueders-Booth had a of photos from that he would to for On a to the New York by the MCI-Framingham project, Lueders-Booth to make a book and suggested that the own might make for an Lueders-Booth his into a room and individuals to was on their for on until their in the the of these recordings the from on the penal system to women such as who had a of to years for a man in to about how they came to be up at “I know in but no no I not for body a woman and I have had I have had about her as a “I of on she “I can look at and after I have to practice it or I have a photographic of their for her one that led to her and to a whose would be taken into the of her family, that act of be made women who are in a incarcerated, or be able to and their up to a of about how she her her at MCI-Framingham it she The of the oral history interviews situate his visual archive also us of its the early after a of that led to the of incarcerated men to other the prison more on the educational Lueders-Booth’s relationship with the also increasingly at one he was from teaching and had to to the which was now to a His own access as a also became more the of such as who to focus on in Lueders-Booth that it was to his to and his to greater on Lueders-Booth’s as a and in the photo world than his eight years of with students and subjects. Unlike the women he taught and Lueders-Booth of on from the prison he other his on the of to his In the years, he lost contact with nearly the incarcerated individuals he had except for a for he as a character at into the A of his was the of the photo years however, Lueders-Booth’s archive from MCI-Framingham in his life, taking up an of shelf and wall in the room that to his house in in he never out to make a project, create an we have as a with its of yet materials that stories of and collection of and challenges those carceral archives defined by Sutherland, but it is not a for the of the carceral was never as year he so in and taking care of this archive, Lueders-Booth struggled to the that he and like a he “I had no that would in or prison reform or of the yet be it He is of his unique as well as the power this his of abolitionist is one of many that make it of While this counter-archive through his efforts and as an and photographer, it was of his with the incarcerated individuals and their arts of and as Lueders-Booth about his pictures, a of this counter-archive of The of and open onto new historical narratives of and