Danny Lyon’s Cotton pickers does not depict nineteenthcentury plantation slave labor but rather 1960s prison labor. The expansive cotton field here contrasts with the workers, whose faces are blacked out, all looking essentially the same. This dehumanizes the African American workers and also speaks to the naturalization of Black labor throughout history, as this photograph, or one like it, could have been taken at a
slave plantation, in a sharecropper field, or in a modern-day prison. The small sliver of sky visible at the top of the image might represent hope for the future, which shrinks as this forced labor continues throughout time in various forms.
Katie Kuhlman, Class of 2023
In this photograph of a work gang in action at a Texas prison, Lyon underlined the historical continuity between American slavery and the prison-industrial complex. Cotton pickers was the result of a fourteen-month project that took Lyon to several penitentiaries in the Texas Department of Corrections. “I’ve tried with whatever power I had to make this picture of imprisonment as distressing as it is in reality,” Lyon wrote. He constructed Cotton pickers to emphasize this despair. The field recedes into the distance from the foreground, and the only visible sky takes up a small portion at the top. The field consumes its workers. The dozen or so cotton pickers are engulfed in a sea of plants, suggesting that the carceral state creates the myth of its own ubiquity.
\nCotton pickers also underscores how the prison-industrial system turns prisoners into factors of production. The inmates in the cotton field are virtually indistinguishable. The figure in the foreground bends down at the waist as he picks a cotton bloom. The four figures behind him stand in almost the same position. This choreography recalls the way the state has regimented the lives of its prisoners.
\nJamal Maddox, Class of 2017
","remarks":"Student label, AAS 349 / ART 364, Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery Across the Black Atlantic, Spring 2017: "},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Campus Voices","textentryhtml":"Self-taught, Lyon began his career as a staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, capturing the vibrant figures of the movement. This series, photographed at prisons in the Texas Department of Corrections, has the opposite effect. It depicts inmates with no control over their fate: standing in long and winding lines, being stripped and searched by prison guards, walking in lockstep to the prison farm.
\nWe are drawn to the homogeneity depicted in Lyon’s photograph of a Texas work gang. The prisoners wear uniforms: white long-sleeved shirts, pants, sun hats, and dark-toned shoes. The figure in the foreground bends at the waist as he picks a cotton bloom. A large bag of cotton, slung over his left shoulder, drags along the ground at his back. Three inmates stand behind him, but the four figures in the front are the focus of this image, frozen in almost the same position. Staged or not, this powerful image alludes to the ways that the prison-industrial complex has regimented subject’s lives, down to their very movements.
\nOddly for a black-and-white image, color is a fascinating aspect of this work, particularly the skin color of its central figures, whose faces are rendered pitch-black. This could be a result of the medium’s limitations: perhaps the film on which Lyon shot this image did not have a great tonal range. But looking at them reminds us of other historical depictions—their darkened skin harkens back to the dehumanizing depictions of enslaved black people. There is their blackness, and nothing else. The prisoners are robbed of their individuality as they are forced to pick.
\nJamal Maddox, Class of 2017