1982.28.19
Heat Exhaustion, Ellis Unit, Texas
Artist
Danny Lyon
(Brooklyn, New York, 3/16/1942 - )
Title
Heat Exhaustion, Ellis Unit, Texas
Creation Date
1967
Century
20th century
Dimensions
10 7/8 in. x 13 15/16 in. (27.62 cm. x 35.4 cm.)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
gelatin silver print
Credit Line
Gift of Michael G. Frieze, Class of 1960
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
1982.28.19
Following his time as a photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Danny Lyon began to photograph men in Texas prisons for a project entitled Conversations with the Dead. Although these photographs were taken a little over a century after the United States’ abolition of slavery in 1865, they shed light on slavery’s pervasiveness in the country’s founding institutions. The passing of the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in all cases “except as a punishment for crime.” This allowed for the re-criminalization of the newly freed Black body. Black people were incarcerated and subjected to hard labor for menial crimes such as loitering and vagrancy, which continued into the Jim Crow era and the War on Drugs of the late twentieth century, leaving Black communities often in shambles and disproportionately incarcerated 150 years later.