Public Talk: Pete Brook, “Prison Silences”

Prison Obscura, currently on view at the Clark Humanities Museum, presents rarely seen vernacular, surveillance, evidentiary, and prisoner-made photographs, shedding light on the prison-industrial complex. In this talk, Brook will discuss the silences that permeate prison culture in the United States: both the silencing of prisoners themselves and the silence of others about the issues and abuses within the criminal justice system.

Pete Brook is a freelance writer and curator based in San Francisco. He writes and edits prisonphotography.org, a website analyzing imagery produced within and about prisons with a focus on the prison industrial complex in the United States. Brook holds a master’s degree in Art History from the University of St. Andrews and a master’s degree in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of Manchester; he has curated shows for Seattle’s Vermillion Gallery, Holland’s Noorderlicht Gallery, New York’s Photoville, and Belgrade’s Kulturni Centar Belgrada. He writes regularly for Raw File, the Wired photography blog, and is working on a book about the history of prison photography in the United States, forthcoming from Silas Finch. 

Exhibition reception to follow in the Clark Humanities Museum at 5:30pm.

Co-sponsored by the Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities.

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