Placebo of Suffering (Placebo Cierpienia)
photos: Corrie McCluskey
text: Agnieszka Klos

Cold cells in some prisons change their use once in a while. Sometimes they become isolation wards, other times – sobering rooms, or execution room. Prisons and concentration camps in the whole world are shrouded in aura of suffering. Corrie McCluskey captures it in her frames.

Death itself is neither picturesque nor ornate. It has no colors. It approaches blackness only to assume its most extreme shade in the climax. Everything bright is associated with freedom. Bright is the air, the sky, the sea, the light. Bright is the day.

In McCluskey’s frames, time ceases to exist, or rather run. And all forms of imprisonment appear the same.

Death, which is preceded by punishment or torture, is ascetic. It permanently resides in the thick concrete walls of Alcatraz or Terezin prisons. It somewhat resembles medieval songs; it is menacing and ancient. It is known that prisons and camps often came into being in places of fortresses, castles, and army barracks. Such locations must have elicited twice as much fear in the prisoners. They landed in a place marked by history, legendary, sanctified by power, ascribed to the public.

Humans in prisons and concentration camps are only articles of trade. They perish, disappear, die, or leave. They leave behind their marks on the walls, written by hand, or in the form of color sediments, for instance, in gas chambers.

Imprisonment is associated with madness. Michael Foucault wrote about the situation of incarcerated people in a very simple and at the same time poetic way. Polish sociologists and theoreticians of punishment, for instance, Waligora, call things by their names in the psychological jargon. They talk about permanent deformation of personality of incarcerated people. In McCluskey’s photographs, one can see severe landscape after people walked through, after all means, good and evil, have been exhausted. It is like a final frame after extermination not only of people, but also of the entire world. A few instruments of torture, which have not changed that much over the centuries, awkward drawings, signatures scuffed with a fork or nail, moist walls, cold floors. Rooms half way between the hospital and the laundry room. 

Like in a good report, the detail and bare fact count in the photography of the American artist. We can reconstruct the whole history only on this basis. Regardless of the ending – good or bad.

Prisons and concentration camps are situated very close to one another in our subconscious. Much differentiates them, of course. In prison, an isolated person works on reconstruction, “repair” of one’s personality. In concentration camps, the course of one’s life is inscribed into gears of the industry of death. And exploitation of one’s body after death. All that remains from a prisoner placed in a camp is soap, anatomical specimen for students of medicine, hair used for making cilices and warm socks for submarine crews, buttons, fertilizer, sometimes some heat energy.

The most severe punishment fails to scare and rehabilitate occupants of prisons. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the most universal and useful for the society form of punishment was pondered on. The possibilities were reported by Michael Foucault in his works. “Non-public punishment goes half to waste,” pronounced moralists of that time; therefore, the ideal prison design placed Law Gardens in the center of the city where, during Sunday walks, families would observe in person meting out the punishment.

Much has changed since then. Today, the biggest prisons in the world are built in secluded places; on islands, in deserts, and remote suburbs. Only the most modern ones, most of which are constructed in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, are fitted with new design and comfortable functional furniture. The oldest ones, such as the legendary Alcatraz, have remained dirty, moldy places without chances for remodeling over the years.

Prison is and will remain the most common instrument of punishment – Alina Semkowska writes in her master thesis on the rehabilitation of prisoners. At the same time, the concept of prison was and still is perceived more metaphorically. Prison is the body, home, room, state of consciousness, the immense area of Siberia, the island where the main character of “Papillon” settled, or a country with political regime. The photographs of McCluskey, in which all places of imprisonment become similar, reveal it most comprehensively. As a result, the viewer receives sort of a prison synthesis regardless of time, place, justice system, or political beliefs.

The most extreme manifestation of incarceration is concentration camp, where, despite many similarities to prison, one phenomenon is nonexistent – habitual self-inflicted physical injury. In the prison environment, tattoos belong to classical, ritual, and mythological symbols.

In concentration camps, they are substituted with numbers assigned by the administration.

Prisons are sometimes defined as “soft camps;” concentration camps, on the other hand, very often have something from prisons in their origin. The fortress in Terezin and the first barracks of Auschwitz were repaired by groups of German criminals, who were brought there along with the army transport. Later, they became the aristocracy among the functional prisoners.

Corrie McCluskey elicits the whole sense of prisons and concentration camps that is enclosed in the aura, placebo of suffering. The spirit of cruelty, victimization, and the lack of compensation hover over Alcatraz, Terezin, and many other places in the whole world. Those are not just empty words. Some strange fog drifts over those areas at dusk. Residents of those places talk about it themselves. It is enough to look at other works originating in death camps to notice how much surrealism pervades the picture. Adam Bujak and his series “Rezydencja smierci” [The Residence of Death], Artur Zmijewski and his controversial “Berek” [Tag], Klauss Elle and disturbing, vampire-like “Illuminacja” [Illumination]. In all these works, just like in McCluskey’s photographs, the place forces its way in and impresses its imprint in the art.

Looking carefully at the two collections of the American photographer, one can say that their combination is the most natural thing in the world. Of course, at first sight, the picture duplicated that way arouses anxiety, but upon reflection, one recognizes that prisons and camps are in the same category of our civilization. It is made by one group of people for other group of people. De Sade and the eulogist of mad debauchery, Jean Genet, wrote about this narrow line between law and freedom a long time ago.

How is it possible that freedom and human life are subject to rationing? Sigmund Freud wrote about the need of punishment and law in the psychological sense. He pointed at the simple social relationship; where is punishment, there is civilization. Beyond the area of wielding power, a wild island extends, similar to the one portrayed by William Golding in “Wladca much” [Lord of the Flies].

People holding the power become pathological. Phillip Zimbardo, psychologist and professor of the Stanford University, who worked on the analysis of prison guards’ psyche, eloquently writes about this phenomenon. Not only ‘functionals’ in concentration camps were characterized by cruelty and absent willpower, or transferring responsibility for their actions elsewhere. It appears that the “effect of Lucifer” affects also selected, trained, periodically examined guards, who are no different than an average American. In the situation of indirect imprisonment, forced to play their roles, guards watching, for instance, Iraqis at Abu Gharib turned into beasts.

There is no unambiguous answer to the question why it is so. Some behaviors can be explained by the group psychology, Dionysus element, and natural human inclination to evil. It is strange; ascetic, devoid of people photographs of McCluskey provoke analysis of human nature more than any portraits. They also challenge fairly popular here theory that captivating mind is most difficult. Meanwhile, looking at them I know one thing: guards and prisoners of places like Alcatraz and Terezin become victims of the same system. In boundaries of which, they create a relatively stable hell of this world. Sometimes in opposition to, and sometimes in harmony with laws existing in the world.

Incarceration
Artist statement – Corrie McCluskey

My photography explores “place” as a cultural artifact. For a decade I have been interested in how objects and environments can resonate with traces of people who have touched them, with the space taking on a life of its own. I have a keen desire to photograph places that touch the deeper emotions - places that are hard to look at, or where those in charge don’t want us to see. I see my work as a commitment to finding the truth and a reminder of our choices as human beings.

Alcatraz was the famous "supermax" federal penitentiary in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It was first used for army prisoners, then convicts who were notorious gangsters, the escape-prone or those considered troublemakers in other American prisons. I was touched by the anonymity and depersonalization that was evident at this fortress nicknamed "Hellcatraz."

What haunts me is not only the mental and physical anguish of incarceration, but also the boredom and monotony. The bare cement walls, rows of cells, barred windows, endless fences and barbed wire - all have an unrelenting institutional sameness; to me they represent a deeply disturbing industrialized system of warehousing human beings, whether they are the “guilty” or the “innocent.”

I also had a strong desire to examine other cultures, situations and historical eras, to confront spaces that contained dark monumental events from the past. As a young person I read much about the social and political history of World War II and felt compelled to see the remains of ghettos and camps firsthand. My chance came with the help of a Czech Holocaust survivor who served as my guide. I had the opportunity to photograph Terezín, Auschwitz/Birkenau and the former Podgórze Ghetto in Kraków in 1999 and 2001.