Reflections on the Innocents

The Innocents: Headshots
Reflections on education, art and social change

When Provisions’ staff decided to exhibit Taryn Simon’s The Innocents: Headshots, we knew that we  were  presenting a body of work that would draw attention from criminal justice reform advocates, lawyers, photographers, as well as the general public.  We also expected that area educators would find the exhibition compelling to their high school and university students. 

In the end, the power and potency of the exhibition—45 portraits of individuals exonerated of their crimes through the use of DNA evidence, after serving prison time, some on Death Row—drew in nearly 200 area students from a range of schools and courses, many of whom were just being introduced to the ideas of wrongful conviction and innocence.

While we initially expected that law and criminal justice students would be a primary audience for the Innocents exhibition and programming, we found something different:  Only one class that came in to tour the show—a Street Law course at Washington, DC’s High School Without Walls—fit that description, while the rest of the classes came from the humanities and social sciences.  Among the courses represented by our visiting student groups were Peace Studies, Documentary Photography, Creative Writing, Introduction to Art History, and Philosophical Problems in Art.

Our experiences with these student tours of The Innocents speaks to the heart of Provisions’ [ability? talent? not mission] of creating a space where issues and art can be experienced in a context that is meaningful for educators and students, and that sheds light on the intersections of art and social change.    As gate-openers to the idea of critical inquiry and socially-engaged art, these educators are crucial in Provisions mission to amplify critical and creative voices for social change; they are helping to shape  thinkers, advocates, and artists even at the high school level.

The twelve students that visited from Massachusetts’ Buxton School were full of questions and observations about the social and economic circumstances faced by many of the men photographed for The Innocents, and were deeply aware and critical of the social inequities facing them and vast numbers of others in the prison system.  These students, like those from Montgomery Blair High school and High School Without Walls, had all come to Provisions as part of a larger teaching unit on the ways that innocence and guilt are documented, and their ideas perpetuated, within the criminal justice system as well as on “the outside.”

Sue Wrbican’s and Peggy Feerick’s Documentary Photography students, mostly senior photography majors at George Mason University, came to the exhibition in order to view and critically discuss the photographs themselves.  The students came armed with knowledge about f-stops and digital photography, and were well-prepared to discuss Simon’s reframing of the conventions of crime photography and documentation, turning the camera around to document these innocent victims of mistaken identity and perverted justice.  They did not, however, expect to engage in the philosophical discussions around innocence and guilt, mistaken identity and visual culture.

Charlie Lawing, an illustrator and instructor at the Arts Institute of Washington, took full advantage of the resources gathered for The Innocents microsite as curricular material, both integrating the web resources, and texts displayed in the library into his required course readings and assignments.  Charlie’s course blog is a great example of how Provisions’ resources can be best used by educators: see.
Following the visit, Charlie wrote us:

“This morning I received papers from the students who toured the exhibit, and who wrote about their impressions. We spent the entirety of today's class discussing the exhibit. I now wish that I had tape-recorded the conversation, for it was really a strong, impassioned discussion. Some comments were about how the exhibit was presented, but mostly we talked about the unjust "justice" system. It was one of those types of conversations that make an educator feel proud.”

Over 80 freshmen Creative Writing students from Howard University experienced The Innocents one Saturday, watching the accompanying video in shifts and participating in active discussion about the idea of storytelling and narrative within the exhibition.  Their professor, Nina Mercer, herself a playwright, requires her students to engage issues of social justice, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ideology and power in their assignments.  This is the type of gate-opener that engages Provisions’ mission in a way that is meaningful, enlightening, and most importantly, provokes students into questioning “what is? and what if?”

Daniel Venne of the University of the District ofColumbia, who brought a student group of various majors—including many “nontraditional” older students—responded likewise to the idea of creating critical space for students.  “The students clearly want discussion, they want something to galvanize them, they want conversations to be relevant,” he writes.  “They're tired of feeling like ‘voice’ doesn't matter, and they want proof otherwise. We've all spent the last several years watching the pendulum swing so far into incoherent socio-political madness, and I think young people are eager to ride it on its way back to the other side. I think this is why Provisions is so attractive to many of my students: they're surprised to find that there's a place to go for social change.”