Inescapable

What do you photograph when you are visiting a tourist spot, albeit one with a tremendous history? How do you take a broken-down prison and turn it into art, into a story? I didn’t have a plan going in. I knew that if nothing else it was practice in the creative act of making good compositions out of an overwhelmingly busy, crowded, but otherwise visually mundane location. What do you do with a location whose significance, whose place in the collective imagination, is bigger and more interesting than its public facade?

I don’t understand my discomfort, after all what is the difference between photographing Alcatraz and Half Dome? Other than the part where one is a stunning, ancient piece of nature and one is a deteriorating government building that used to house criminals. Sarcasm aside, how is Alcatraz an “over photographed tourist trap” and Half Dome…not? Is there not more room for story in a prison with such a storied history?

I have been here before and left with nothing more than the requisite iPhone snaps of my kids behind bars. But a photographer I admire one said on his podcast that he would love to photograph Alcatraz. Photograph Alcatraz? It inspired me to try.

This is my attempt at making something out of this inescapable prison that proved only unable to escape its own cultural intrigue. It’s the story of a place with an unfinished story. This is Alcatraz as it is with a nod to what it used to be.