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Preview image of work. gelatin silver print,  Heat Exhaustion, Ellis Unit, Texas 9328

1982.28.19

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Heat Exhaustion, Ellis Unit, Texas

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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.