Avenal, California

Stephen Tourlentes

1997 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Tourlentes lives in Boston, where he has taught photography at the Massachusetts College of Art since 1988. This photograph is part of a series begun in 1996 that explores institutions on the peripheries of society. Tourlentes has been particularly fascinated by the proliferation of new penitentiaries built in recent years across the United States to house a rapidly growing prison population. In elegant large-format photographs, he investigates the uneasy relationship between these institutions for incarceration and their neighboring communities. The presence of the prison is especially inescapable at night, when its rows of high-powered searchlights overwhelm the sleeping town, transforming the neighborhoods into scenes evoking extraterrestrial invasions.

Artist

Stephen Tourlentes

Date

1997

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. Gift, 2000