Camp In Perm

Daily Life, second prize stories

00-02-1990

Life in a women’s prison camp in Perm, 1,300 km east of Moscow.

Commissioned by: Contact Press Images

Photo Credit: Jane Evelyn

Jane Evelyn Atwood was born in New York and has been living in France since 1971. Her work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, or choose to ignore.

In 1976, Atwood bought her first camera and began taking pictures of a group of street prostitutes in Paris. It was partly on the strength of these photographs that she received the first W. Eugene Smith Award, in 1980, for another story she had just started: blind children. Prior to this, she had never published a photo.

In the ensuing years, Atwood has pursued a number of carefully chosen projects, among them an 18-month reportage of one regiment of the Foreign Legion, following the soldiers to Beirut and Chad; a four-and-a-half-month story on the first person with AIDS in France to allow himself to be photographed for publication in the press (Atwood stayed with him until his death); a four-year study of landmine victims that took her to Cambodia, Angola, Kosovo, Mozambique and Afghanistan; and a three-year color work in Haiti; always with the same personal and passionate approach.

Jane Evelyn Atwood limits her stories to those which truly compel her, devoting to each subject the time necessary (in some cases, years) to explore it in depth. In 1989 she started to photograph incarcerated women, eventually managing to gain access to some of the world's worst penitentiaries and jails, including death row.

Jane Evelyn Atwood describes her method of work as "obsessive". She does not move on to a new subject until she feels she has completely understood the one at hand and her own relation to it, and until she believes that her pictures reflect this understanding.