for a data and software company. While the job comes with its own set of pressures and deadlines, “it affords me the opportunity to do the other things I do without any compromise. If you are fine arts photographer and somebody asks you to take pictures of their school, you could—as an artist—say that that’s beneath you or that it’s not what you want to be doing, but there’s always something you learn in those kinds of situations about your craft, that you can bring back. So you shouldn’t turn down things wholesale, just by definition, but you don’t have to live there, either.”
Inside the Penitentiary “I didn’t want to make a Ken Burnslike documentary about it, especially when I had only a single day to shoot,” Siskind explains. “One day—that’s all I was going to get. ‘Hope the weather’s nice. That’s your day.’ I just decided to leave it open-ended, more of a meditation. I didn’t want to do, ‘This is the whatever building, it was built in . . . ,” you know. I wanted to recreate an experience by looking at it in a way that it has never been seen before.”
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Sure enough, the shot will progress, as though leaving, then pull back. This happens at intervals throughout the film. “All of that was my way of suggesting what might have been the consciousness of some of the people that were there,” Siskind says. “It was in an abstract way of paying homage to what might have been—good, bad and all the in-between. It was a compression of the human experience.” And a remarkably effective device. Siskind sums up his film as “a forced exercise in empathy. If you do watch the whole thing, maybe
you come out of it feeling that, ‘I just went through this car wash,’ or some such, that feels as though you were suspended in time, in some way? That’s really all you can hope for.” While Siskind can think of 20 reasons to save the prison and 20 reasons to demolish it, he’s less philosophical about his own community. “I don’t want to get in an argument about gentrification. It’s happening,” he says. “Everything that is visually rich and interesting about this neighborhood will be gone. All of it will be new shine, new sheen, faux corrugated rusty steel,