The body of prison power

Abstract

This visual essay revisits the infamous medical science experiments conducted on prisoners at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison, 1952–1974. It reads ‘a body’ into the prison’s now dilapidated architecture, where the geographies and logics of imprisonment and medical science once intersected. Appropriating visual conventions of scientific representation to image the internal spaces of the former prison, the photographs and 3D prints composing this essay seek to raise and wrestle with questions about memory-making, archiving, and the creation of material culture in the context of captivity. This is not simply to document a vanishing site in order to recuperate a lost story, but to reflexively stage or enact an engagement with inescapable loss and to contemplate the stakes of that loss in our understanding of knowledge, power, and freedom.