Degrees of Visibility

Building upon the eighteen years of Hunt’s Correction Documentary Project, “Degrees of Visibility” is a large body of landscape studies that look upon the spaces that surround prisons, jails and detention centers throughout all 50 U.S. states and territories. Each is shot from a publicly accessible point of view how those spaces show and conceal punishment and the growing scale of mass incarceration. Sitting at the limits of what a photograph can describe, each image is shot from a publicly available point of view and titled according to the number of people who are imprisoned but concealed within that landscape. The images focus less upon what each prison looks like or the visual state of its prisoners, and more upon how they are hidden, sitting among different forms of land use, geographies, and the histories of control and rebellion they hold — wondering if there is a politics of visibility that makes mass incarceration possible.

“Weak, False and Filled with Holes” (2018), written with Elizabeth Webb, 1 of 3 takeaway newspapers produced alongside the exhibition, this one discussing Charlottesville, Virginia and the resistance to desegregation after Brown vs. the Board of Education.