Eastern State Penitentiary
Digital art by Jared Christopher Martin (United-States)

Why do castles, fortifications, prisons and coliseums designed for the black arts of torture, violence and aggression look so much better in ruins? Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia travels with this crowd. It can be a gloomy subject in November but there is a deep and resonant beauty here - a monument to muffled institutional despair, with strangled shrieks echoing in the imagination, and the light of day so parched and worn from the sinuous journey to reach buried cells even the shadows are confused, and solid granite walls crumbling into powder; yet the structure has more atmospheric vitality than almost any public monument I’ve visited; rivaling the catacombs on the Via Appia for emotional historical critical mass. Despite the name penitentiary – a place of penance – I don’t think there was much religion going on inside the walls; but the structure is a North American treasure, a monument that both repels and attracts and is impossible to forget. I visited the prison on a whim and had to use my cell-phone camera; which delivered enough information to reconstruct a larger image. As you can imagine a prison is a collection of thousands of details accumulated over hundreds of years of time, and each detail needs to be observed and reproduced without minimalizing or cutting corners. This always leads to a huge image, in this case printed at 45 X 42. I apologize for the halos and artifacts that stubbornly survived the attempts at digital reduction.

cell camera and computer

collecting sifting and super imposition of images, blending, print out hand detail, rescan and final finish in PS.