BEHIND THE RAZOR WIRE
THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF LABOR
FACTORIES SCHOOLS PRISONS
Praise for the photographs of Michael Jacobson-Hardy:
“Finely Crafted images—artfully composed and scientifically precise.”—Miles Unger, Boston Globe
“The remarkable portraits Michael Jacobson-Hardy has made inside prisons in Massachusetts represent visual evidence of invisible populations, invisible worlds: prisoners, cells, bars, corridors, guards, gates, doors, work settings (where, among other things, American flags are produced), and external landscapes—exercise yards, gun towers—all surrounded by cyclone fences and layer upon layer of razor wire.”
—Angela Y. Davis
“A stirring, beautiful, and upsetting book, handled with dignified restraint and artistry.”—Jonathan Kozol
“These stirring photographs are not just excellent portraits, but a portrait of the America that the power elites don’t want us seeing much less thinking about.”—Jim Hightower, best-selling author and national radio commentator
“Jacobson-Hardy’s photographs movingly capture the human side of “landscapes” all too often ignored. They strikingly illustrate the physical side of skilled and unskilled labor, and the shockingly unsafe conditions under which too many people work. The accompanying statements are poignant and painful, as the workers express their fears about job insecurity in circumstances over which they have little control. People want to work and are proud to work. But there have to be jobs that pay livable wages.”—William Julius Wilson, Director, Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program and Malcolm Warner Professor of Social Policy, Harvard University
“The University Gallery of the University of Massachusetts Amherst presented The Changing Landscape of Labor: American Workers and Workplaces. It was one of the most popular and well-attended exhibitions in our twenty-year history.—Betsy Siersma, Director, University Gallery, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
“Jacobson-Hardy works very much in the social documentary tradition but without either the sentimentality or condescension sometimes associated with that genre. And, as in Walker Evan’s work, Jacobson-Hardy’s photographs have a strong aesthetic component with striking compositional geometry and handsome tonal modulations.”
—Ellen Lawrence, Director, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross
“The humanism of his approach pervades the pictures, individualizing the people whose identity has been reduced to that of inmate. Particularly eloquent are unpeopled interiors and exteriors of prison buildings, unremittingly antithetical to the possibility of normal human experience, let alone redemption.”—Lucy Flint-Gohlke, Curator, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College
“If I were to describe Michael Jacobson-Hardy’s greatest strength, it would be his tenacity, commitment, and loyalty to the people with which his work is concerned. ”
—Sonia Nieto, Professor, University of Massachusetts School of Education, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
“Michael Jacobson-Hardy combines so many different talents and interests in one person and one life-work—a sensitivity to photography as both an aesthetically satisfying art-form and a socially powerful medium of political advocacy and a social conscience that adds an element of moral depth and seriousness to his important work.”—James Gilligan, M.D., Harvard Medical School
“It is the timelessness of the intense detail of almost arbitrary things—the twitch of complexity beyond our dream—that powers these images. Obsessive, reverent, frozen in time, like iron, they speak sadly of industrialism and the callousness which is instilled by repetition. I have a feeling it is always the machines which win. Reluctantly, we become their servants.”—Emmet Gowin, Visual Arts Program, Princeton University
“Inertia is the unexpected subtext of a remarkable new book by documentary photographer Michael Jacobson-Hardy,The Changing Landscape of Labor: American Workers and Workplaces. Jacobson-Hardy’s powerful images capture New England workers, some in scenes that were little different a century ago, others seemingly borrowed from a George Lucas movie set.”—Elizabeth S. Padjen, Art New England
