Working creatively and collaboratively with photography in a prison is ethically fraught, due to the historical symbiosis of prisons and photography, and the stark inequity between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people. This practice-based research project explores methods for turning towards and articulating these challenges asking: What new ways of working with photography emerge from the collaborative creation of a photographic archive with imprisoned people? And, drawing on artist Walead Beshty (2015): How does the social and ethical context in which collaborative photography takes place become visible? I take Ariella Azoulay’s work (2019) on the interactions surrounding the photographic moment, and Tina Campt’s approach of ‘listening to images’ (2017) as starting points for addressing these questions.

During a year-long series of workshops with imprisoned people at HMP Dumfries in Southwest Scotland, we collected, generated, curated, and discussed images reflecting aspects of the prison that co-creators felt should be remembered. We developed a dialogical, para-archival approach (Slager, 2015) that presents aesthetic logic as an alternative to the illogicality of the prison. Installing and documenting artwork in the prison was key, bringing creative practice into conversation with institutional space. The outcome is a layered, polyvocal record of a place. It is also a collaborative meditation on what it is to record, to document, to create and co-create, and what it means to do so whilst imprisoned. The nuances of the collaboration are captured through an ethical framework, through my reflection on roles and collaborative modes (facilitated by audio recordings of workshops) and through the artwork itself. Each of these elements was the subject of detailed discussion with co-creators and their contributions crucially informed my understanding of the research project.

The impact of the prison environment on the collaborative process and the images we produced was all-pervasive, but the project opened an interstice, a small space 8 for creativity and collaboration. Crucially however, the value of projects like this is in both making space for and visualising something that imprisoned people are already experts in, that is the daily practices of creativity, hope and aesthetics that are essential for survival in prison (Fleetwood, 2020, Kelly, 2022). This research project makes an original argument for the potential value of collaborations between incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists, which is in making space for the practice of the interstice.

Turning towards ethical challenges can lead to new understandings of photography and power in the prison. The significance of this work is in interrogating methods for placing ethical complexity at the centre of a collaborative art project, and articulating the nuances of the process. This should be of interest to those pursuing collaborative research in the arts and social sciences, and more specifically to artists working with participatory photography.