Started 2009.
Photo Requests from Solitary was initiated by Tamms Year Ten (TY10), a grassroots coalition of artists, advocates, family members and men formerly incarcerated in Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois.
In 2009, TY10 invited the men in Tamms to request a photograph and promised to find an artist to make the image. The requests included the sacred mosque in Mecca, comic book heroes locked in epic battle, Egyptian artifacts, and a grey and white horse rearing in weather cold enough to see its breath. The resulting photographs provide an archive of the hopes, memories and interests of men in isolation.
The project now continues in other states as a collaboration between Parsons/The New School for Design, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Solitary Watch, and Tamms Year Ten, with support from the Open Society Foundations Documentary Photography Audience Engagement Grant and the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Read more here.