Amy Elkins: Nine Years out of a Death Row Sentence (River)

The limited-edition photograph is by the winner of the 2014 Portfolio Prize, Amy Elkins, from the series Black is the Day, Black is the Night. Expanding upon her series Parting Words, Elkins explores the issues surrounding capital punishment.

As a part of her process, Elkins exchanges letters with prisoners on death row, interspersing those letters with images created in an effort to capture the interior landscapes evoked in these correspondences: imagined seascapes, recreations of items described by prisoners, a prison lunch tray purchased on eBay. She also creates color portraits of inmates by pixelating and obscuring their faces according to the amount of time each individual has been locked away.

Nine Years out of a Death Row Sentence (River) is an interpretation from one of these exchanges, with a pen pal serving a death row sentence who described being baptized several years ago. The Father had to reach through the bars to touch him; even with such restrictions, he remembers the touch as electric. Despite this, he feared it wasn’t good enough to save him. He longed to do a full-submersion baptism in a river, like Jesus had. This image was constructed out of his description of the river he wished to be baptized in, using appropriated images which were composited to account for the number of years he had spent in prison.

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.