The Strangers

Louisiana State Penitentiary, 'Angola', is America's most infamous and largest maximum-security prison It's 18,000 acres, (larger than Manhattan), hold over 5000 inmates, mostly African America. Eighty five percent have killed, raped or robbed with violence and eight out of ten have life without parole. In Louisiana, life means life and most will eventually die there. When you spend time with these man and talk to them about their lives one starts looking without distortion and starts to see something else: a complicated moral issue about the sum of a man.

If in this controlled hardened environment one can honestly see something good in a man, then perhaps a man is greater than his experience alone. It is the structure that the penitentiary creates, one that enhances the guises that oscillate between good and bad and one that creates something murky, which demands more time. The folly of mankind remains complicated.

First exhibited at the
University of Arts London