DURHAM, NC.-Cummins Wide features Bruce Jackson's 1975 Widelux photographs from Cummins Prison Farm in Lincoln County, Arkansas. In 1970, a federal judge determined that conditions in Arkansas prisons were so poor that the entire prison system was unconstitutional. A year later, while driving from Buffalo to San Francisco, Jackson stopped at Cummins to see what the worst prison in the United States looked like. Over the next five years he visited and photographed seven more times.

Jackson made the majority of his Cummins photographs with Nikons and a Leica M4, but during his last two visits, in 1975, he used a Widelux, a 35mm camera with a rotating 26mm lens. A Widelux image covers almost two full frames and is approximately 140 degrees wide, which is close to the field of view of someone with normal vision. However, while human vision is limited at the periphery, Widelux images are in focus all the way across the field of view.

“When I look at these prints, I feel as if I’m confronting something I’ve looked at before but never really seen,” Jackson says. “And you can’t look at these images without moving your eyes, which realigns the geometry of what you’re seeing. That’s part of their mystery and power.”

Cummins Wide is part of a large group of works­books, film, sound recordings, journal articles, and photo exhibitions­about prison as a cultural site. Most of Jackson’s fieldwork for the project was done in Texas and Arkansas from 1962 to 1979, but he also did work in Missouri, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and California. He was also in New York for the Attica prisoners’ civil rights trial (because of abuses by police and prison officials during the retaking of the prison in September 1971) in 1991 and 1992.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Bruce Jackson will screen his film Death Row, made in Texas in 1979 with Diane Christian, on February 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the Durham Arts Council’s PSI Theater. The screening is open to the general public and is part of the Doc U Arts Institute, presented February 7 – 10 by the Center for Documentary Studies. For more info: http://cds.aas.duke.edu/courses/workshops.html#docuarts

Cummins Wide is presented in conversation with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Chapel/Chapter, March 19, 8 p.m., Page Auditorium, West Campus, Duke University – part of Statements of Fact: Documentary in Performance, a series offered by Duke Performances.

Additional support for CDS Exhibitions is provided by the Office of the Provost at Duke University.