This is the first in a series of essays about some of my more challenging and unusual photo assignments with subject matter that it would be inappropriate or impractical to display on the website. Later essays will include descriptions of: an art photography project with some autistic children, a personal portrait of a small rural community in West Africa and an explicit safer sex guide for gay men.

A Photo Shoot at Women’s Prison In England, for The Prison Reform Trust
I have had several commissions to photograph particular aspects of prison life in recent years, for two quite different types of client. My work for the Probation Service has been pretty straightforward. The Probation Service is keen to inform the public and sentencers in the criminal courts about the work they do with prisoners. Working for the Prison Reform Trust is slightly more complicated. As an organization campaigning to improve conditions in prisons The Prison Reform Trust has, amongst other things, to highlight problems in prisons. Turning up at a prison on their behalf with a camera in my hand I tend to feel slightly awkward knowing that the top brass at the prison want me to see how well they are doing in difficult circumstances, whilst I need to leave with a set of pictures that will serve The Prison Reform Trust’s agenda. It’s obviously a little more complicated than that, but the base reality is hard to avoid.

Quite apart from the structural politics, I approached this particular job with some apprehension. I had visited my first women’s prison only a few months before on a job for the Probation Service. It stood right next door to a similarly laid out men’s prison but I felt that it was a noticeably more tense and unhappy place than the men’s prison. Even a moment’s reflection about the things that many woman prisoners leave behind might have explained why this was so, but there were plainly more complex problems beneath the strained surface. As it turned out this particular prison was to give me some new things to reflect on.

After going through the usual rigorous security checks, giving up my mobile phone and witnessing some seriously noisy lock and key action I was ushered through onto ‘the other side’. After a short solitary wait in a sort of no man’s land I met my minder and guide for the day, a very senior prison officer. Like most of the people I meet in highly responsible positions these days he seemed quite young, certainly too young to have so much responsibility.

I had arrived an hour early, but my guide made it plain that this was good news as far as he was concerned as we’d catch more of the action. He was warm, enthusiastic and eager to impress upon me how important it was to him that I got all that I came for. I had to fight a certain cynicism. “Surely”, I thought to myself, “he couldn’t mean all that stuff. I bet they’ve lined up material that will have me coming away with a rather false view of the place…”.

The first thing that struck me as we moved away from the entry lodge was the beauty and order of the large garden just in front of the first prisoner cell-block. Hanging baskets, well tended lawns and even a largish pond boasting enormous flowering orchids and big fat goldfish. There had obviously been a lot of time and love lavished on it. My guide seemed delighted at my first impressions. This was all so unlike my last prison shoot. I had to pause to remind myself where I was and what I was there for.

We went up to an office where I listed my fairly ambitious photographic hopes for the day. I braced myself for the reasons why not and legal restrictions but my guide seemed to think we could manage most of what I was after. What impressed me most about him in that first conversation was his obvious love of the job and pride in what he felt he was achieving with the women there. This was amply borne out over the next six fascinating hours as we moved around the prison meeting the inmates and prison staff in a wide range of situations.

For fairly obvious reasons the first challenge when taking photos in a prison is finding inmates and prison officers who are prepared to be photographed. One can tell some prison stories without people or just the backs of their heads, but real identifiable people are so much better. Great care is taken to make sure those offering their consent do so freely and are prepared to sign a release form that sets out clearly what we are up to with the pictures. I can’t be sure why, but there were so many people willing to cooperate with us that day that we had to get extra release forms printed. I hadn’t expected such a great willingness to be involved. It must say a lot about what the Prison Service is achieving there.

It was one of the hottest days of a fairly long heat wave. As we moved onto the first prisoner wing I noticed that it was quite stuffy but not as bad as one might have expected. This may have been a consequence of the absence of any big glass windows. Going into one of the two-person cells for the first time I struggled to imagine what it must be like being locked in such a small space for most of the day. One of my most important tasks was to give an impression of how cramped conditions were. Not difficult! The cells were really tiny with a minute adjacent chamber containing a toilet and wash basin. It would have been grim for one person, but at that time many people were living two to a cell with bunk beds. There were some improvements going on but the structure of the cells would continue to dictate a basically cramped environment.

The inmates’ valiant attempts to personalise the rooms with photos, posters and knick knacks, TVs, ghetto blasters etc. helped to lift the gloom, but often made the rooms seem even smaller. I was very touched by people’s willingness to show off their efforts yet at the same time they were desperate to tell me and the outside world about living in these conditions. All I could do was listen carefully and do my best with the pictures. I left the wing feeling a strange mixture of things. There was sadness at the lives of the women. I felt very privileged at having been allowed into such intimate spaces, and great relief that in a few hours I’d be out of there and on my way home to freedoms and choices that they could only dream of.

As I moved around the prison meeting a wide range of women I kept catching myself thinking “…you’re far too nice to be a criminal …”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, and “… what are you doing in a place like this?”. The women were just like people you’d meet outside. Intelligence, charm, physical attractiveness, as well as all the other stuff, were very evident to a wholly unremarkable degree. I did have a little wobble when during a very casual conversation an inmate made a passing reference to being a “lifer”. I didn’t know if this was true but it made me shudder thinking about what she might have done to warrant the sentence. We were in the tailor’s workshop at the time with lots of hard sharp things around. Prejudice in flight! I saw – not for the first time – that one of the biggest problems in these women’s lives is the outside world’s opinions about them. Some seemed very vulnerable. Others spaced out. There were a few who were obviously deeply suspicious of me and my motives for being there, and kept as far away from me and my camera as possible.

It was interesting to note the high proportion of the women who obviously took great care over their appearance even though there was no viable male company anywhere near. One of my subjects was very obviously pregnant and plainly ambivalent about it. There was a touching moment when one of the male prison officers drew on personal family experience to offer her reassurance about some unexpected movements and sensations in her belly. It was clear that the prison officers really worked at creating good relationships with the inmates, not an easy thing given the burdens of security and discipline. Odder still given that however well staff got on with inmates, the women were always referred to as Miss X or Miss Y. It’s a great testament to the professionalism of the prison officers that such a good level of relatedness was possible.

My partner, a biologist based at Oxford University, has just published a major textbook about pheromones. It’s mostly about animals but there’s a chapter about pheromones and humans. One of the few areas where it’s been shown that pheromones exert a well proven biological effect with humans is the synchronised menstruation of women living closely together in institutions. I found myself wondering what it must be like being around mass PMT inside an institution where there is already so much stress.
Whatever people may have been making of a large bald black man with lots of overlarge jewellery wielding cameras and complicated forms to sign, I was generally greeted politely and enthusiastically wherever I went. My reassurances that inmates had given me exactly what I’d been after went down very well. I don’t suppose there’s an abundance of acknowledgement on offer to these women in this kind of environment.

There were a lot of ethnic minority inmates, though not as many as recent news reports had led me to expect. The only ethnic minority staff I encountered seemed to be non-uniformed administrators or medics.
I had one of the saddest experiences of the day in the visitors’ suite. The suite consisted of sets of four or five chairs arranged on two sides of about half a dozen low tables in a fairly large open plan room. It was comfortable but certainly not about intimacy or privacy. I was warned that it would be very unlikely that anyone would agree to being photographed. Sure enough our first approach was rebuffed.

With spirits sinking we approached another table at which sat a particularly attractive thirtyish Mediterranean looking woman with a huge mane of dark curly hair. She wore a very fetching silver satin finish trouser suit and a big warm smile. On the other side of the table sat her two visitors, a twenty something mixed race couple. The man, black and casually dressed seemed quite shy and quiet. The blond haired woman at his side had the air of an enthusiastic trainee social worker. They all said yes to photos , breezily signed the release forms and then – exactly as I had asked - proceeded to have their meeting as if I was not there. The way they joked and gossiped you would have thought they were in some trendy wine bar. I began to wonder if the glamorous inmate had been through all this ‘prison lark’ before. I resisted the temptation to ask in case anything that emerged might endanger my pictures. I - and I suspect my guide - could not believe my luck. I thanked them, gathered my equipment and moved towards the exit.

My guide needed to have a few words with the officers in charge of the room before we could leave, so I found a quiet corner, and with my cameras safely back in my bag observed what was going on around the room as discreetly as I could. Several small groups were engaged in subdued conversations across the tables. In the far corner I observed a woman prisoner having what seemed like a fairly relaxed conversation with a child. The woman was in a secure cell like room and spoke to the child through a small slit in a large panel of toughened glass. I could not see the child’s face. I could hardly bare to imagine what it must have been like for either of them. Embarrassed at the possible inappropriateness of what had become my fascinated gawping, and distracted by sobbing I turned to see a young African woman slumped in a chair with her head in her hands. Opposite her sat an African looking man and a white woman – possibly a lawyer – with lots of paper work. It was sad sight. They seemed indifferent to her distress as they chatted away to each other. I do not know what was upsetting her. Her despair was horrible to watch. All sorts of questions sprang to mind about how she might have ended up there and what she’d been forced to leave behind in the outside world. My guide was ready to leave. For the first time that day I was very glad to be leaving a location. I took up a few more very useful photo opportunities elsewhere in the prison, and started to enjoy myself again, but could not forget the sad scenes in the visiting suite.

The last subject brought things nicely full circle. We decided that it’d be good to get some genuine interaction shots between my guide and the inmate with principle responsibility for the gardens. She’d been quite elusive for most of the afternoon but we eventually tracked her down hanging some new baskets in the area adjacent to the pond with the lilies and goldfish. She was probably in her early thirties, with a very relaxed and friendly manner. She chatted away to the guide with an ease that suggested they were more like colleagues or friends than prison officer and inmate. As time passed the prison officer and inmate element of their relationship became more evident in the language used, but there was obviously trust and respect on both sides. She was obviously very proud of her role in the creation of such a pleasing environment After taking some shots of her tending to some well ripened tomatoes I was invited to sample one. It was delicious. I groaned with pleasure and was rewarded with the offer of a bag of them to take home with me. I’m not normally much of a tomato man, but knowing what had gone into the production of these particular specimens certainly sharpened my senses.

That episode nicely summed up and symbolised the day: a series of pleasant surprises, poignant moments and challenges to my assumptions about prison inmates and the people who look after them.

Robert Taylor, photographer, August 2003