Paradise Backdrops Turn Prison Walls Into Fantasy Escapes

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We expect brightly colored scenes of sun-kissed beaches and snowcapped mountains from cheap calendars and Trapper Keeper binders, but in visiting rooms throughout American prisons, idealized scenes like these serve as backdrops to countless portraits.


Prison Landscapes, a six-year project and new book by artist Alyse Emdur, throws light upon this unexpected phenomenon. The garish murals — and more recently digitally printed backdrops — function in exactly the same way as backgrounds in commercial portrait studios. Aesthetically, they are almost indistinguishable.


“If you weren’t familiar with prisons, you might think these were prom photos or made in community centers,” says Emdur of her collected portraits. “They’re very ambiguous.”


The precise history of the backdrop as a common feature of prison visiting rooms is largely unrecorded. Clearly, they grow out of the prison mural tradition — a famous example of which would be the six frieze murals in the dining hall at San Quentin State Prison that depict parts of California’s history. Murals in Oregon and Washington State include the Cascade Mountains; Gulf Coast prisons feature beaches; and in New York State prisons — where the majority of prisons are upstate but the prisoners are from New York City — are murals of the Big Apple skyline.


In a digital age, however, murals done in acrylic and enamel paint are slowly being replaced by large, store-bought printed screens.


“In Otisville, New York (10th image), we can see a painted scene of the Statue of Liberty, but in front of it is a digital backdrop of the same scene,” says Emdur. “The inmates prefer the photo backdrop to the painted backdrop.”


Prison administrators claim the backdrops are for security purposes — using them for portraits obscures any details about the prisons that might be used for escape. The murals spare prisoners and families the indignity of a never-changing prison setting; the murals at least offer an alternative. They’re so common that many prisoners have never even thought about the backdrops and that they had even forgotten they were there.



Emdur’s interest in prison visiting room portraits began in 2005 when she unearthed a Polaroid photograph of she and her sister posing with her incarcerated older brother. She recalls, even as a 5-year-old, her discomfort posing for the camera with a tropical beach scene to her back.


In order to research prison portraiture, Emdur contacted more than 300 prisoners and explained her intent to collect and decipher this widespread but invisible vernacular form of photography. Just over 150 prisoners agreed to be part of her project and 100 portraits made it into the book. During this time, Emdur wrote and received hundreds of letters.


“My act as a photographer is not from behind the lens but as a collector of images,” says Emdur. “I see myself as a mediator. These are people who have had no relationship with the outside world so while Prison Landscapes might be a very small gesture, the people who chose to be involved in this project want to be seen; they have their own agency. They want the outside world to know they aren’t the criminals they are stereotyped as.”


Relatively late in the project, Emdur resolved to visit prisons herself to photograph backdrops at a wider angle. In the space of two weeks, she gained access to 10 prisons on the East Coast. Her photographs offer context to the portraits she had already collected. In informal interviews, Emdur was able to get the perspective of the prison administrations, psychiatrists, superintendents, guards – “people who enriched my understanding,” she says.


“Prison portraits are very intentionally framed to exclude the surroundings,” explains Emdur. “They are hiding what the visiting room actually looks like. For me it is very important to show the viewer, who maybe hasn’t been in a prison visiting room, the details, and to place the backdrops in a context.”


In their simplest interpretation, prison visiting-room portraits are about familial connection. Emdur’s thoughts returned time and time again to the estimated 1.5 million children in America with incarcerated parents.


“These photographs reflect the image that many children will have of their parents,” says Emdur. “The collateral damage of — and how families are damaged by — mass incarceration is not an aspect that is at the forefront of people’s minds when they think about prisons.”


The photos are emblematic of a cultural disassociation from the prison system itself. Just as these backdrops allow prisoners and their families to avoid documenting their own reality of incarceration, so does the U.S. avoid most public discourse about policies and attitudes that allow the country to lock people up at six times the rate of the next most punitive industrialized nation (the United Kingdom) and quadruple the prison population over the last 35 years. At the heart of the enabling is the tendency to reduce each person in prison to a one-dimensional, almost inhuman, caricature of a “prisoner” — something Emdur hopes her project combats.


“Clearly prisoners are more than their crime,” says Emdur “I’m not saying they’re not criminals; they are in prison because they were convicted and proven guilty. I am not going around that but it is important to look at these images and consider the rise of the prison industrial complex. The portraits reveal a system and how individuals fit within that system.”


Prison Landscapes, published by Four Corners, London is now available. Alyse Emdur is very grateful that Four Corners will donate books to each of the individuals whose portraits feature in the book, and to 100 prison libraries in the U.S.


All images: Alyse Emdur


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