In photos: Inmates of the oldest women’s prison in the USA

In 1970, Jack Lueders-Booth quit his quit his day job to pursue his passion for photography. Then 35, he landed at Harvard University where he managed their photo lab, and soon after began teaching photography. 

In 1977, Lueders-Booth approached the Graduate School of Education with an innovative idea for a Masters degree that would require him to be in the field, rather than the classroom. He wanted to teach photography to incarcerated people, using it as a tool to boost morale, build camaraderie, teach valuable skills, and preserve moments with family during visiting hours.

For the project, Lueders-Booth partnered with Massachusetts Prison Art Project, which wanted to set up a photography program at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Framingham, the oldest women’s prison in the country. Originally founded in 1878 to punish women for giving birth out of wedlock (“begetting”), the prison now housed sex workers, addicts, and accomplices to their male partner’s crimes. 

By the mid-1970s, MCI Framingham began implementing progressive reforms in an effort to create a more humane environment. Prison officials allowed prisoners to decorate their cells with the comforts of home and employed criminal justice students at nearby Northeastern University as plainclothes guards.

For the program, Lueders-Booth was given an abandoned wing of the old prison hospital, where he and his daughter installed darkrooms. He set to work teaching Photography 101, beginning with photograms to introduce new students to magic that can only happen inside the darkroom. From there they graduated to pinhole cameras, and eventually to conventional cameras and film that they learned to develop and print themselves.

What began as a Masters project quickly blossomed into something more as Lueders-Booth began teaching portraiture using a 4×5” view camera. He invited the women to become sitters so that they could experience the act of making a portrait on both sides of the camera. In 1980, he received back-to-back six-month Polaroid Fellowships and immediately set to work making portraits of the women. The slow, meticulous process of crafting these images became a revelatory experience of seeing and being seen.

“It was completely organic. I went there weekly, sometimes more often, if there was a family event or a party. The women would want me to photograph some of their kids,” says Lueders-Booth. ​“Someone said, jokingly that I become something like the school photographer of the prison. I would go into some of the women’s cells to make photographs and I would pictures that I’d made of them in previous months or years on their walls.”

With the publication of Women Prisoner Polaroids (Stanley/​Barker), he revisits this seminal body of work, bringing together a series of portraits and oral histories for the first time. Taken together, Lueders-Booth creates a poignant portrait of women interrupted, their lives no longer wholly their own, their incarceration far more devastating than statistics could ever show.

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