The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the nation into the default mental health facilities.”
Jenn Ackermann is one of my main influences within photography and I truely love her work. She completed this series entitled ‘Trapped’ in 2008, and wanted to document the mental health crisis in America, the US has a very open attitude towards mental health and everyone seems to be in councelling or on medication. Ackermann wanted to get deeper into the issue and photographed inside the correctional psychiatric treatment unit in Kentucky. Ackermann wanted to show how mental illness inmates are dealt with inside prisons, obviously prisons are not the best places to treat them but Ackermann demonstrates through her images just how the prison is dealing with it. Jenn Ackermann did not want to show the inmates in any particular light and kept objectivity through out the project, she concentrated more on documenting the treatment processes and how the inmates are cared for within the prisons.
Ackermann ensured that she documented all aspects of her time spent in the prison, ensuring that we saw all sides to the story, the good and the bad. With this body of work Ackermann has documented the issue of mental health within prisons, this touches on the moral issues too such as being insane is not a crime, but letting them hurt other people and themselves is, so how should the guards treat the inmates, as criminals or as patients?
Ackermann has documented this issue very creatively, the image above is a great example of this. Ackermann has exhaggerated the image by using blur, I feel she has done this in order to demonstrate how this person may be feeling and to show his frantic and scared state. The way he is looking at us emphasises this further, he has a scared and vunerable look about him, like he is looking to us for help, the fact that we can see the bars he is behind makes the image harder to look at. You feel a sense of guilt, not being able to help this man at all and this creates an almost uncomfortable atmosphere around this image. The way that this image has been composed leaves it open to many interpretations, you are left wondering what is happening here, why does he appear so distressed. It leaves it up to your imagination.
These two images work in a similar way to the first, left up to us as the viewers to interpret what is actually happening here, especially in the top image as it is difficult to see what is written on the pages. It is unclear as to whether or not it makes sense at all but must be of importance as this man is wanting to show them to us.
The way in which the subject is displaying the papers to us is rather interesting, the way he is holding them up along with his facial expression appears quite intimidating. It is as if he is trying to prove something to us, or he is perhaps justifying his crime. The top image is one of my favourites, what works particularly well for me is the connection between the subject and the photographer, as the subject is looking straight into the camera there is no escaping his gaze.
The use of black and white within all these images works effectively as it offers us no distractions, if these images were to be in colour I feel that they may have become too busy. The second image here is already rather busy and if colour was thrown into the mix the image would become a lot harder to read. Again Ackermann has used blur here to exaggerate motion and chaos. I feel it works well throughout the body of work that Ackermann has used different methods in order to capture her images. This stops people from becoming bored and keeps people on their toes whilst looking through, it also represents some of the franticness that happens within the prison itself. Being there I am sure that there is not many moments of peace and stillness, I feel that Ackermann’s images demonstrate this well, having the mix of still quiet images as well as the frantic chaotic images.
I find this to be a very powerful image, it reminds us that these patients are locked up and seperated from us. The composition of this image is what I find to be most endeering, it is particularly effective how we are looking at him through and window whilst he is looking out of his own window. He is looking outside wishing he was out there whilst we are looking at him inside from the outside, it is like we are almost looking at each other but from a different angle. There are a lot of shapes within this image, the shapes from all the signs above the window, the square window we are looking through and the long rectangle window the patient is looking through.
The use of black and white too in this image is also very interesting, there is a constant jump from black and then to white, from the notices on the door to the door itself and then finally the white room, white clothes and black man. The blackness of the door and the whiteness of inside the room makes it appear almost like we, on the outside are bad and the person on the inside is good. This is due to the connotations you associate with white and black, black being evil and white being pure, this is interesting as in fact if anyone is ‘bad’ here it is in face he who is in prison. All of Ackermann’s images have quite an distressing and heartbreaking atmosphere to them, these people are almost helpless, some of them perfer to be in prison as its safer for them whilst others do not understand why they are there. Some of the images bring out a sense of guilt within you, whilst others just make you feel uncomfortable, the image above makes me personally feel sad, I just want to give this man a hug and tell him that everything will be ok but I know that I cannot. This relates to the idea of the gaze and scopophilia, we are watching people and getting enjoyment out of it, of course not in a sexual way but this image in particular reminds me of it. Especially as we are looking through a window, it makes me feel guilty for looking at him without him knowing, the image makes me feel almost voyeuristic.
This being a documentary project brings about some critical issues such as whether the photographer remained objective throughout the project. This depends on whether or not the photographer intended to remain objective, within this particular body of work I feel that Ackerman needed to be, she was wanting to document how the patients are treated and cared for within the prison. I feel that the images we see above are the truth, especially working with mental health patients it would be extremely difficult to ask them to convey certain emotions etc. Ackerman said that she often found herself having to remind herself that these men are actually criminals, even though they may not have been completely conscious to what they were doing they still committed crimes. I can relate to this as I often found myself forgetting that these men were prisoners, and started to feel sorry for a lot of them.
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