1This article and the VR film Affiorare (Surfacing) are part of a practice-based research entitled “Immersive Documentaries and Visual Anthropology: Towards the Use of 360° Cinematic VR in Prison”, started in 2018 in the Doctoral Program in Digital Media (UT Austin|Portugal Program) at the University Nova of Lisbon, in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Turin in Italy and with the financial support from FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. All names have been changed to insure anonymity.
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Video Link: https://vimeo.com/983087891
Video Link: https://youtu.be/CW117a1_S7g
- 1 Affiorare (Surfacing), by Rossella Schillaci, VR Film, 20', Italy-Portugal, prod. My Boss Was and L (...)
3Surfacing (2022)1 is a 360° linear experimental Virtual Reality documentary of 20 minutes. The audience plunges into an immersive ‘fairy tale’ set amongst mothers and children who live in Italian prisons. A fantastical journey through prison geographies combines live capture with animation of surreal memories in old panopticon prison spaces, and flights into children’s dreams of their future ‘home’ spaces. The storytelling and the illustrations have been created through a deeply collaborative process that lasted more than three years, spanning the pandemic.
4Based on principles of co-creation, polyphony, and multiperspectivity, this VR film grew out of practice-based, transdisciplinary, and multimodal research on mothers and children living together in conditions of imprisonment. The objective is to deploy the tools of 360° virtual reality and spatial-cue sound to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces they are living in, how they endure the challenges of raising children in prison, and how the children themselves perceive this ‘reality.’ The attempt to hear their own voices and perspectives in relation to Mirzoeff’s ideas (Mirzoeff 2011, 2015) brought me and a group of artists and practitioners to experiment and employ different forms of art media and methodologies—such as illustration, animation, digital storytelling, photo elicitation, and anthropological observational fieldwork.
5In this article, I describe my use of photography as a tool for exploring children's imagination, fears and dreams. Furthermore, paraphrasing Mirzoeff (2011), in my practice-based research about mothers in prison with their children, photography has been an important method to discover the “right to be seen” and not only “the right of look,” as he said. “I want to claim the right to look,” he writes, and specifies:
The right to look is not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. As such, it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectively. (…) It is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable. The opposite of the right to look is not censorship, then, but visuality. (Mirzoeff 2011: 473-474)
- 2 see Bonifacio, V. and R. Schillaci. (2017). Schillaci, R. (2020). A Family Cell: Visual Ethnography (...)
6In my project, I conducted photographic workshops in Italian special detention centres for mothers and their children. These workshops were an integral part of my multimodal anthropological research, where I used several artistic practices such as photography, illustration, digital storytelling, and VR filmmaking. Before using these artistic practices, I started with “traditional” observation and empirical note-taking, but soon I realized that for several reasons, writing notes was not welcomed in prison, by both inmates and prison staff. These issues will be explored more deeply in upcoming articles and in the dissertation thesis; some of them have been already addressed in published articles.2 In this article, I focus mainly on the use of photography as a fundamental method to reveal the unseen: the need for escapism and the need to be seen for all the protagonists of the project.
- 3 Ninna Nanna Prigioniera (Imprisoned lullaby, 2016) by R. Schillaci, Prod: Indyca, De Film en Aiguil (...)
7In 2016, I produced an observational documentary film on mothers in prison with their children, Ninna nanna prigioniera3. During the three years of production, I confronted the limits of the observational approach in such a sensitive context as the jail. The limits concern both the process of observing and filming painful everyday life situations over a long period, as well as the representation of these delicate situations, trying to focus on what very young children could have seen and perceived.
8After that project, I started to experiment with creative methods and new digital tools. The transition between different approaches and media can create new forms of languages and experiences. My final aim was to support the participation of small children and young people in researching and filming, in order to allow a process of engaging and expressing their ideas.
9In 2018, I started a new project to produce an experimental film, which uses VR 360° technologies, combining ethnofiction and animation. The VR project is focused on the look of the children and their resilience. Children may find shelter in their imagination, and this is part of their positive resilience, which has been conceptualized as as a “positive adaptation” to adverse situations (Hopf 2010). How do they perceive the place where they are, how do they picture what scares them? How do they express anger? And what do their hearts desire, what do they dream about for their future? These were the questions who led my research, employing participatory creative practices adapted to virtual reality, with the aim to reflect about the imaginary related to the spaces and the different perceptions of time, past and future, within the prison.
- 4 ICAM: acronym for Istituto di Custodia Attenuata per Madri Detenute, a special detention center for (...)
10During fieldwork, all my questions to understand better the space of their detention centre, called ICAM4, as perceived by mothers and children, failed. Even though I kept asking about the spots inside ICAM they liked most, or those they disliked, they only answered: “I hate all of it,” or “Everything is horrible here.”
11Later on, I was authorized to bring a camera. I feared that the camera could cause more problems and tensions, but instead both mothers and children were enthusiastic and started to play with it. I explained to them how to focus and frame, and allowed them to take pictures by themselves. I started doing photo labs with the children, asking them to photograph what they like or dislike in the place where they live. They said they liked the grass, the sky, and animals, but in prison you can see very little of such (figures from n.1 to n.3).
Photo taken by children and mothers in prison, from 1 to 3
1. Photo by Rossella Schillaci and participants in the photo lab in prison
2. Photo by Rossella Schillaci and participants in the photo lab in prison
3. Photo by Rossella Schillaci and participants in the photo lab in prison
12They asked me to be portrayed while they were playing in the small garden inside the prison. Their favourite game was to climb over the wooden fence, although they knew they were not allowed to (see figures n.4 and n.5). By playing with the camera the children created another reality, a fantastic illusion, where they could transgress and behave in ways they could hardly explain with words. Some afternoons, mothers too asked to be photographed while they were playing with their children. Indeed, the camera helped solicit more of these opportunities for recreation. I believe these “photo lab” situations, completely informal and spontaneous, made their life a little bit more pleasant, if only for a short while. Some mothers told me they forgot they were surrounded by bars, surveillance cameras, and prison police vans. In these situations, they could escape through their imagination, as if they had become children again. Playing with and around the limitations imposed by the prison rules, the medium of photography acted as a means of escape from the monotony of detention, even for just a few hours. (figures from n. 6 to n.11).
Children and mothers in prison, from 4 to 11
4. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
5. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
6. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
7. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
8. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
9. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
10. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
11. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
13There are moments during fieldwork when something unexpected happens: it can be an action we witness, or some words said by someone we interview. It hits us without prior notice, and then it starts to move inside us and take up space and time, and slowly change our understanding and perspective about the context in which we are working.
- 5 Ninna Nanna Prigioniera (Imprisoned Lullaby, 2016), see note n. 4
14Once, when I was taking pictures with the children in the garden of the ICAM, an old inmate woman – from the big Female Section of the prison – arrived. I knew her from my previous film made in the female sector5. She has a long sentence to serve and she is a landmark for all the new inmates. She was also a point of reference for me, and I always took with great value all the opinions about prison life she gave to me on the rare occasions we could bump into each other, before the guards noticed. That day, she was going to work in the kitchen to help cook the meal for children. She looked at me with a strange gaze. I felt embarrassed, so I immediately took off the camera, saying that I was taking the pictures only of the people who wanted to participate, and had authorized me. She answered, “Yes, I know. Of course, you are. But you should come to our prison female section as well. All the women there would love and would need to have a picture of themselves.” And she went straight inside the kitchen. I was not allowed to follow her to ask more.
15It took time for me to understand. It also took time for me to “detach” from my first research questions, connected to the issue of space, and how people inside perceived the prison territory. Instead, mothers and children asked me to have a portrait, they were not interested at all about the space of the prison. They just needed a picture to send to their relatives. One mother told me, “I haven't had pictures of the girls growing up for three years.” This sentence was so simple and yet so important for me. We are so used to have photographs of all the events that happen to us. Photographs mark our life, allowing to share our experiences with families and friends. But mothers who live in prison for years have no rights to take photographs, and therefore they have no recollection of the growth of their children. Inmates have no pictures of their child trying to walk at two years, or how he or she changes at four. What I suddenly realized was the impact of the absence of photographs in people lives.
16So I accepted to be their ‘professional’ photographer and followed their requests: they chose the spot and posed. Usually outside in the garden, or in few favourite places inside, like the laundry hall, “the only place where it smells good and I can be relaxed on my own”, as a mother told me. I tried to keep my interest about the places, but I was open to their requests, attentive to what new discoveries this new photographic activity could bring.
17They usually stand fiercely and proudly looking seriously at the camera – both, mothers and children. It was strange for me, as I was used to taking portraits of my son and friends, who immediately smile as soon when I point the camera lens at them. I asked why none of them smiled. They said they preferred it like that, but then, to make me happy, they tried to smile. I decided to take mostly close-ups, to avoid including the omnipresent prison bars surrounding their bodies. Instead, they asked me to shoot full length because, as they explained to me, they wanted to show their families they were thriving and in a good physical shape, that they had “not gained weight”. They also wanted to show that they had managed to raise their children, tall and healthy.
18I was aware of the ethical challenges of bringing a camera inside a prison, and was also afraid of portraying people who needed to be protected. Yet what these people really wanted was exactly the opposite: they wanted proof of their existence, proof of their being alive in prison – moreover, evidence of their being alive despite the prison – the place where they had been enclosed and disconnected from the rest of the world, sometimes for years. They wanted the right to be portrayed and the right to have visual self-representation.
19And yet the issue of visibility, underlined by Mirzoeff, surfaces again: how to show these pictures in public? Mothers and children wanted to be seen: they wanted to show their beauty, their strength, and their young age. They wanted to demonstrate that they were stronger than the prison. They wanted to communicate with their relatives but also with the outside world. They signed all the privacy papers needed, from me and from the Italian Minister of Justice.
20But here comes my dilemma: may I throw their images on the web, not knowing how they will be used, from whom, for how long, if they will cause harm in their future attempts to build a new life and forget their past in prison?
- 6 Amanda Darrach, 2023 Q&A: Fred Ritchin on AI and the Threat to Photojournalism no One is Talking ab (...)
- 7 Ritchin 2023. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/the-looming-specter-of-artificially-generated (...)
- 8 https://c2pa.org/faq/ (assessed March 1, 2023)
21These reflections are important especially nowadays, when new Artificial Intelligence is creating databases using all published images to be re-elaborated and to generate new images. Systems like OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney make it possible to use text prompts to produce images, in seconds, that closely resemble photographs of people and places that never existed, or of events that never happened.6 New visual AI can generate convincing images, but how has photography been used to confirm the expected typically relying on stereotypes? “We have gone from an era in which “the camera never lies” to one in which Photorealistic images can be conjured up without the use of a camera. It will take a concerted effort by the public, companies, and governments, as well as by journalists, educators, and technologists, to understand the implications of this profound change in imagery.7 The call for the need to protect our archives: “Detecting whether or not digital content is fake is currently impossible at internet scale and speed because manipulation software is increasingly more sophisticated, metadata can easily be manipulated and provides no proof of its origins.”8
22With this new perspective, the ethics of photographing detention centers might be more crucial. For Lacson, the problem of photovoice results from the uncritical understanding of circulation and its effects, including a lack of attention as to how images are consumed and understood by ever-expanding global publics. (Lacson 2014). If photography can capture worlds which are often invisible to broader society, what responsibility do we bear as producers of these images? By capturing the reality of these spaces – both physical and emotional – photographers generate an archive of unseen experiences. The picture reminds the viewer that prisons function to sanction and hide the incarcerated. Shall we put a ban on inmates’ faces – keeping them invisible in the image? Shall I erase their faces, so they are not recognizable? For example, the Syrian visual artist Khaled Barakeh, in his photographic series “The Untitled Images” (2014)9, completely erased the bodies of Syrian children, leaving a white hole of their silhouettes, to reflect on the representation of atrocities and trauma.
23However, would this action – erasing their individual characteristics and leaving only the context – not be against their will and need to be recognized instead? Their gaze is so serious and so powerful. I think that their way of looking at the camera is the main detail that stings the observer, to the point of wounding, because it contrasts so much with the prison context all around. I believe that the penetrating characteristics of a portrait have the power to seduce the viewer, revealing something of the personality and even the habits of the women and children portrayed. In this way, also the beauty of their bodies: bodies of children growing and mothers in their twenties, locked up in spaces that are too confined.
24After many attempts, I arrived at a “painful” compromise: in this article, there are published only the pictures where they are seen from behind, or they are not recognizable, without any erasure.
25The first time I brought the printed pictures inside the prison, I had to do a long process of checking with the police officer, who was not happy about giving their portraits to the mothers. They only wanted to authorize children’s pictures. These let me reflect more about the right to be seen in some contexts where human rights are often at mercy of people in power. After long insistence and improbable explanations about how the pictures were useful for the development of the VR film, I managed to give all the pictures I printed. For mothers and children seeing them, was like a party. Finally, they could send photos to their partners and relatives (see pictures from n. 12, a mother is choosing which images send to her husband).
26The writer and artist John Berger wrote in his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding worlds; … The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe… When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.” (2008: 7, 8)
27How affectively important is a picture for the loved ones who cannot visit? How does it create a bond, even from a distance? How important is it to see the face of a loved person – although just in a printed image – and think, and feel, about him or her?
28Susan Sontag (2004) writes that a photograph haunts us, we remember our past through them. Perhaps photography, in prison, guarantees a bond, makes love relationships still exist. Photography testifies, remembers, keeps feelings alive. Especially for those who are incarcerated.
29For the children, the printed picture was a magical object, something they had never had before. They used them to play, to exchange among themselves, as I used to trade cartoon character figurines with my classmates when I was a child. They even wanted to be photographed with their printed pictures in their hands, as in a kaleidoscopic reflection of their image that propagates indefinitely (see figure n. 13).
30In conclusion, the photo camera was a powerful “research tool” and helped me to understand better some topics connected to my research project, and in particular the relationship between women, children and prison. I took several pictures during the “improvised lab” that I then used to write my script and build the storytelling with mothers and children, to collaborate with the VR film Director of Photography and the other professionals involved, both at the level of storytelling and at a practical level: where it is possible to put the camera and where it isn’t, an issue that is more crucial with a VR camera.
31In the final VR film (as it can be seen in the trailer linked at the beginning of the article), some places and some crucial actions have been filmed and added in the final cut (like the prison garden and the fence in pictures n. 4, 6, 9 and 10, and the children running around the fence with the desire to cross it). We also filmed the room-cell where mothers and children live and where they have hung the pictures made during the photo lab, so precious for them.
- 10 The use of illustration and animation in this research project will be addressed in other upcoming (...)
32In conclusion, I can say that the use of photo camera in my fieldwork helped me to understand the importance to integrate their imaginations, memories, dreams and fears about the prison. This meant for me to be able to change my research questions and accept the new challenging issues this project was arising. In order to do this, I had to find new creative methodologies, not based only on observation and interviews like traditional anthropological methods, that “are often too static to capture the unfinished, transitory, and ever-changing character of people’s interior experiences and expressions as they emerge in the present tense” (Irving 2011: 25). In the following stages of my research, the re-elaboration of the mothers and children’s memories, feelings, and imaginations associated with the confined places, was carried out during other artistic labs, using mainly illustration, animation and digital storytelling.10
33The considerations that have emerged from the ethnographic fieldwork, led me – as a researcher and as a filmmaker – to recognize the value of creative and visual multimodal methods. After this first experiment with the photo camera, I decided new ways to proceed, in collaboration with the participants of the research projects, in accordance to their needs, ages, and wishes but also negotiated with the limits of prison context. We then worked with illustrated images, as another powerful tool for elicitation. Illustrations helped children to represent experiences difficult to express in words, or incommunicable thoughts and feelings, like their nightmares or their fears, but also their dreams and hopes for their future life. But it has been the photo camera, and the collaborative process of taking pictures together, which brought me and my filming subjects to explore deeper levels of our research topics and let me understand the need for new visual instruments to open to children’s perspectives. The photo camera has led me to discover new ways of entering the world of children to delicately address their complex and sometimes traumatic range of waves of anger and aspirations. The photo camera became for me an unexpected “magical” ally, that could bring mothers and children outside of the prison, a way to escape with thoughts and imagination and to be seen by their loved ones, as well as by themselves.
Children and mothers in prison, from n.12 to n. 13
12. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
13. Photo by Rossella Schillaci
34Rossella Schillaci is an award-winning filmmaker and visual anthropologist. Her works are based on her in-depth anthropological research using cutting-edge audio-visual methodologies. She obtained her PhD in Digital Media, with practice-based research in digital media and anthropology. Her PhD project, the experimental Virtual Reality documentary Affiorare (Surfacing), won the Best Practice Research prize from BAFTSS and several prizes in international documentary festivals. She has published several journal articles about her multimodal research and methodological contribution to anthropology. She is part of the Colab International Research Program involving Portuguese universities and the University of Texas at Austin. Her Master's degree in Visual Anthropology is from the University of Manchester (UK).
35Schillaci co-founded the independent production company Azul (www.azulfilm.com) where she works as a researcher, author, and filmmaker. She has produced and directed more than 20 films, broadcast on TV by ARTE, Sky, and Al Jazeera. All her documentaries have been awarded in international film festivals, including: RAI, NAFA, Fespaco, Jean Rouch, Venice film festival, Sheffield doc fest. Among her latest films, Les enfants en prison was co-produced and broadcast by French television Arte and won the Etoile de la Scam, recognition given to the best documentary films broadcast in France, and Libere has been distributed in more than 200 Italian cinemas.
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