trace evidence

selected images

About this project . . .

Trace Evidence: The Accommodation Series

Maine State Prison, at Thomaston

Accommodation: 1. The act of accommodating, or process of being accommodated; of fitting, adapting, adjusting, suiting; adaptation, adjustment. 2. Adaptation of a word, expression, or system to something different from its original purpose. 3. Self-adaption; conformity to circumstance; conciliatory disposition or conduct; obligingness. 4. An arrangement of a dispute; a settlement, composition, treaty, or compromise. 5. The supplying with what is suitable or requisite. 6. Anything which supplies a want, or affords aid or refreshment, or ministers to one’s comfort; a convenience; an appliance. (esp.) Room and suitable provision for the reception of people; entertainment; lodgings. (Formerly mostly in plural)

In 1823, construction began at Limestone Hill in Thomaston, Maine for a state prison. The original prison had 50 cells which were 9 feet long, 4.5 feet wide, 10 feet high. The cells were all occupied by 1824. Between 1824 and 1923, additions and renovations were made to the prison in response to need for more cells and changes in penal philosophy. That year, a fire destroyed most of the original prison; however, a new prison was built at the same site, re-dedicated in September, 1924. That prison served Maine until February, 2002, when the inmates at Thomaston were removed to a new facility in nearby Warren. The prison closed on February 14, 2002, and was razed over a period of several weeks the following spring. A park now fills the site which served the state by housing serious offenders for nearly two centuries. In that time, prisoners spent a total of 22,300,000 days in confinement.

These photographs were made at the Maine State Prison, at Thomaston, a few weeks after the prison closed. I photographed there for many reasons. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to make some visual record of this facility before it was demolished. Prisons are a significant part of any community, revealing much about our needs and fears and values. Our beliefs and concerns are evident in the architecture, the building materials, the kinds of work and recreation for which spaces are designated, as much as in the choices about who should be incarcerated and how they should be treated while in prison. The guard tower and barbed wire are architectural details that are being superceded in new facilities by more high-tech methods of surveillance and restraint. Inside the prison, we see other evidence of the general public’s attitudes in the fact that there is a chapel, that a law library was available to inmates (and was the best in the state at one time), and in the fact that prisoners performed work-cooking, working in the wood shop, and the like. A prison reveals how a culture accommodates itself to the fact that some members of that society will deviate from established norms in ways that harm others.

Equally importantly to me, looking closely at a prison lets us see how the inmates accommodate the circumscribed conditions of a life “inside.” Because prison cells are so spare, we can spot traces of the former inhabitants in every room, evidence of the ways men accommodated themselves to incarceration.