Who Is Sandow Birk's Are Prisons Obsolete?

“California artist, Sandow Birk, was inspired by the colonizing of the landscape by prisons to produce a series of thirty-three landscape paintings of these institutions and their surroundings” (14), Angela Davis describes in her introduction to Are Prisons Obsolete? Through the eyes of Davis, Birk’s paintings reveal our ideologies about prison. Birk uses location, appearance, and natural setting to help focus that lens. The use of these techniques, along with others, helps enhance the reader’s ideologies of prison that focus on isolation, taking prisons for granted, and alternatives for prisons. Predominantly, Birk uses the location of the prisons in his paintings to show isolation. He paints these vast rolling hills and then inserts a prison into the painting. I do realize that he is painting prisons, but when the viewer takes in the whole scene the prison stands out against this vast beauty of nature. In some paintings, the prisons don’t stand out; they are incased in fog or there is another more prominent …show more content…
Birk’s landscape painting of visiting day at San Quentin resembles a quaint town in French Revolution era. In Birk’s painting of San Quentin, the architecture is analogous to that of the Bastille. The Bastille was a fortress in Paris and was destroyed in July of 1789 during the French Revolution. The painting, in a way, draws the viewer back to that time period. The viewer can see the beauty in the architecture. The painting, therefore, shows indirectly how old-fashioned the idea of confinement if. Davis writes, “Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode of punishment until the eighteenth century in Europe” (42). This proves how antediluvian the idea of incarceration as punishment is in society. Davis shows that prisons have been around since roughly the 1700’s. Isn’t it maybe time to start looking at new forms of punishment to keep up with the changing