Kodachrome Plantation: Bruce Jackson’s Color Prison Photographs

Abstract

This article examines the color photographs that were taken by Bruce Jackson at prison farms throughout Texas and Arkansas between 1964 and 1979. It not only asks why Jackson’s photographs have been exclusively published and exhibited in black-and-white, but also explores what might be gained by seeing the prison farm in color. Extending from Sally Stein’s examination of the rhetorical meanings of monochrome and polychrome photography in the interwar context, this article argues that, due to the widespread recirculation of Farm Security Administration photography in public life during the 1960s and after, black-and-white documentary gained a newfound historical authenticity. As a result of their clear resonance with Depression-era photographs of manual, agricultural labor, Jackson’s photographs were drained of color in order to displace the institution onto a remote past. This article claims that, by coding the prison farm as both in and out of time, Jackson’s color photographs upend the way in which we have been made to see the prison farm and, in doing so, produce an alternative history of the 1960s and after––one that fully attends to the ongoing temporality of slavery and its afterlives.