The Prisoner’s Dream: Queer Visions from Solitary Confinement

At first glance, the photograph Space where the Robert Taylor Homes used to be looks so mundane, so ordinary, that it doesn’t demand more than a moment’s attention. If you look hard enough you can see the Chicago skyline. The high-rises and skyscrapers are hidden behind the foreground of the image—the cracked cement and patched grass of an empty lot. The sky is slightly overcast. The grass is ragged and brown. There is a red fire hydrant and a tree that is either budding leaves or losing them. It might be March or perhaps November. The only remarkable thing about the photo is the empty space. A space so big in a city so large could not always have been empty. People, homes, buildings, and communities were there and are now only perceptible by their absence. The photo attempts to capture what can no longer be seen; it grasps at a kind of visible invisibility that characterizes what Shawn Michelle Smith calls “the edge of sight.”¹ The photo tells a story about what is left behind by newer systems of economic and carceral state power that have emerged over the last forty years. The dismantling and privatization of public housing like the Robert Taylor Homes in favor of the biopolitics of homelessness and an unprecedented system of racialized and gendered incarceration are critical features of this shift from the welfare state to the carceral state.² In this way, the photo documents that the sign of economic and carceral violence is often nothing at all. Gravel and weeds are the detritus of a system that is unimaginable and sometimes incomprehensible.

The photo is part of an online and touring exhibition titled Photo Requests from Solitary, created in 2009 by the organization Tamms Year Ten, a grassroots coalition of artists, advocates, family members, and people formerly incarcerated in Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois. After facing years of opposition, Tamms Correctional Center was closed in 2013. Like some eighty thousand people in US prisons, the prisoners at Tamms were kept in solitary confinement, locked in small concrete cells for twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day without human contact, held often for years, or even decades, at a time.³ For this exhibition, the organization invited Tamms prisoners “to request a photograph of anything in the world, real or imagined, and promised to find volunteers to take them.” The organization wanted to give prisoners “a chance to see something they want to see, used to see, or may never see.” The resulting requests ranged from “a brown and white horse rearing in cold enough weather so that you can see his breath,” to “a picture of my auntie’s house on 63rd and Marshfield at 2:00 pm,” to “comic book heroes locked in epic battle.”⁴

By making visible what has been disappeared from the visual landscape, Space where the Robert Taylor Homes used to be is a sign of the forms of power that made Tamms possible. In other words, the carceral state makes itself known in what we see—the construction of hundreds of new jails and prisons in the post-1970s era—and by what has been erased and forgotten. By asking prisoners to imagine places and times beyond the visual constraints of the prison, the project documents the dreams, desires, and hopes of people held in a state of suspended death. Indeed, Photo Requests from Solitary asks the simple question, “What would a person in complete isolation want to see?”⁵ For this particular photo, the requester wanted to “have some picture of 53rd State thru 43rd State where they have took down the project Robert Taylor Homes.”⁶ The request was to see something that is no longer visible. But the photo also acts as a method for making known the forms of violence that evade normative modes of recognition and perception—the forced disappearance of people, buildings, resources, and communities under new systems of power that often go by the names freedom, justice, and equality. By showing the buildings and...