Valley State Prison: Women Prisoners Weekdays

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the Women of the Valley State Prison series by American photographer Cy Williams, based in Los Angeles. He told us how he fell in love with a child from photographs from magazines, learned to take pictures from great contemporary photographers, working as their driver, and what he saw in the women's prison in California, where he arrived on the instructions of Colors magazine.

I was born in Atlanta, but at an early age we moved to a small town a couple of miles south of the border of Georgia and Tennessee. My father was a lawyer, and my mother was a primary school teacher. I had no idea about any art, but my mother always bought magazines in a local grocery store. I was fascinated by the outside world that emerged from the pages of National Geographic, I loved flipping People, looking at celebrities and dreaming about how I would move to Los Angeles. Even while shopping for food, I always looked at Skavullo's Cosmopolitan covers and stories about sex in Detective Files magazines. I kept folders with photographs torn from magazines and newspapers, but I never had a particular desire to learn something about photography. I went to college with a very vague idea of what I want to do in life. At twenty with a penny, I moved to Miami with a girlfriend who wanted to become a model - in the 90s Miami Beach was a hot spot in the fashion world. Commands of fashion magazines burst into there from cold New York to shoot photo shoots, and the Germans came to shoot for catalogs. I found a job as a driver in a production company: I drove new photographers every week and after a couple of seasons I began to assist them. So I had experience with values like Stephen Meisel, Herb Ritz, Peter Lindberg and Arthur Elgort. I was lucky to be at the right time in the right place, this was my school - I managed to find out what it was like to film before the digital revolution. Then I moved to New York and started to make fashion and catalogs myself until I made a photo series about children wrestlers from Appalachia, which completely changed the direction of my career.

I was in touch with Anthony "Two Guns" by Fletcher, a former world boxing champion who was awaiting the death penalty in Pennsylvania. Fletcher claimed that he acted out of self-defense considerations - he shot the neighbor’s drug addict in the leg and insisted that the wound did not pose a threat to life. But the victim had AIDS and his mother refused to dress him, so he died from blood loss. I was planning to do a series about men on the death row, but then I came across a prison dating site and decided to look at the problem from a different angle. I am glad that in the end I chose women as heroines - there is not such a strict regime in women's prisons, and it’s easier to contact them. This shooting was published by Detour magazine, Arianna Rinaldo from Colors saw her and suggested I remove an exclusive for their anniversary, 50th issue about prisons.

I went to the Valley State prison, completely unaware of what to expect — I and my two assistants were briefly briefed on the spot. All this is explained to you by a public information officer, this is something like public relations. I was also accompanied by a guard. Before that, I communicated by mail with several prisoners, but could not get meetings with them. However, I had their camera and block numbers. At first there was a feeling that all this is much more like a college campus or a science campus than a prison. I, in general, moved without any problems among local residents, each of whom was convicted of a crime from robbery to murder. To be honest, it seemed to me that it would be difficult to convince them to film for the material in the magazine, which would then be sold in all the kiosks. But it turned out that I was mistaken. I was almost never refused when I asked for a pose for a portrait, and no one put any obstacles in the way - I could go where I wanted. For example, they let me into the courtyard while charging, into the church hall, into the medical building for young mothers and, of course, into the cells where women spend most of their time. For shooting, I chose heroines that seemed to me textured - but for every woman there is usually a powerful life story that she is ready to share.