Amy Elkins’ Thought-Provoking Project Born From Correspondence With Death Row Inmates

Los Angeles based photographer Amy Elkins recently won the 2014 Aperture Prize for her project Black Is The Day, Black Is The Night, which explores identity, time, and masculinity through correspondence, memorabilia, and composite landscapes, involving death row inmates. Elkins based this project on a number of long-term friendships she developed with men either serving lifetime sentences or on death row. As a pen pal to these inmates, Elkins explores an alternate sense of reality, reaching toward that of the 1,500 people currently on death row in the United States.

Drawing from these conversations and histories, she formulated composite photographs representative of what she learned of these men, and then created a method of aging and manipulating the photographs based on how much time had passed since they were first incarcerated. What comes from that are these gauzy, dreamy photographs that are clotted with layers but still delicate and vague, nearly transparent. The loose metaphor of memory, clarity, and vision are entangled in this series, heightened by photographs of the actual correspondence, memorabilia, and quotes from various letters.

The title of the project comes from a poem Elkins received from an inmate, “It spoke about that environment so well. The idea of being pulled away from anything. Experiencing no variance. Everything is the same; everything is dark. The poem is mind-blowing. Better for him to describe the situation than me.” (Excerpt from Source)

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