The body of prison power

Abstract

This visual essay revisits the infamous medical science experiments conducted on prisoners at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison, 1952–1974. It reads ‘a body’ into the prison’s now dilapidated architecture, where the geographies and logics of imprisonment and medical science once intersected. Appropriating visual conventions of scientific representation to image the internal spaces of the former prison, the photographs and 3D prints composing this essay seek to raise and wrestle with questions about memory-making, archiving, and the creation of material culture in the context of captivity. This is not simply to document a vanishing site in order to recuperate a lost story, but to reflexively stage or enact an engagement with inescapable loss and to contemplate the stakes of that loss in our understanding of knowledge, power, and freedom.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Photographs of Holmesburg’s ruins abound online. It has also been the site of five films and several music videos, in addition to being the subject matter of ghost stories.

2 For example, see the works of Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González at http://www.philagrafika.org/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UC Institute for Research in the Arts, and the Science Studies Programme and the Communication Department at UC San Diego.

Notes on contributors

Cristina Mejia Visperas

Cristina Mejia Visperas is an Assistant Professor of communication at the University of Southern California and author of Skin Theory: Visual Culture and Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU Press).