A few months ago I was invited by Anke Schuettler to be part of a meaningful collaborative art project involving inmates at Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum-security men’s prison in North Portland, Oregon.

From the press release:

The project, called Answers Without Words – a photographic research project between prisoners and the rest of the world is a dialogue in images that has involved 30 prisoners, and 17 international photographers. The project also extended to a whole class of 24 photography students at Sacramento State University taught by Pete Brook. The prisoners and photographers have sent questions back and forth and have answered those questions in photographs only. While some of the photographs were created in countries all over the world – chosen by the prisoners as places they were curious about, others were composed in the very restricted and limited surroundings of a prison classroom. The result of all this work is culminating in two parallel exhibitions, one at the prison and one at Cascade Paragon Gallery. This project received funding from by Precipice Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Calligram Foundation, as well as Eicholz Fund.