Inquiries

Please contact Sara Bennett to bring Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences to your community.

Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences is a long-term project comprising more than 50 women convicted of homicide and sentenced to life in prison in New York State. Tracing the women’s lives across time and space, the portraits were taken inside prison walls, in the women’s post-incarceration bedrooms, and as they re-entered society after decades beyond bars.

All images are on archival paper, size 20” x 24” or 24 x 30” and on each paper is a reproduction of the subjects’ handwritten statements, providing glimpses of the women’s lives both inside and outside prison. The work can also be exhibited with personal ephemera provided by the women themselves, including Polaroids, stuffed animals, drawings, and letters.

__________________________

“You are my ‘why I do this.’” — A Bronx Defender, Photoville guestbook, Brooklyn

“Thank you for letting these women have a voice and sharing their stories.” — Leah from L.A., Photoville guestbook, Brooklyn

“Your work is powerful, provocative, and inspiring. Both the Law School and the community have been educated and enriched beyond any measure that words could have accomplished.” — Mary Lu Bilek, Dean, CUNY School of Law, April 30, 2018.

“Our great rotunda regularly draws countless judges, court staff, jurors and all manner of visitors to our court. From the moment your exhibition went on display it attracted significant attention from all of these quarters and ... it was very apparent that so many of those viewers were ‘connecting’ with your important work.” — LS, Senior Court Analyst, New York County Courthouse, November 27, 2017

The room was hot, but students, faculty and outsiders alike sat and stood wherever they could, all attentive and fascinated.... “I think students are hungry for real things,” said [Dean] Kessler, “things that bring what they’re learning in the classroom in contact with something concrete.” — The Purchase Beat, September 16, 2015.

Thank you for sharing these wonderful photos.... I am a state court judge in Wisconsin and I know that it is important to think about the human story of every person who comes before my bench. — MH, W83 Gallery guestbook, NYC

Thank you for pointing your camera in a direction we need to look at with love, care, and deep concern. — CJ, Photoville guestbook, Brooklyn

“First you opened our eyes and hearts to the women who had been released after serving long sentences in prison and were trying to live on the outside. And now you take us inside the prison to show us the women who have been invisible and voiceless in our society. I can’t think of any more significant way to use photography than what you are doing with it!” – Patricia Lay Dorsey (Grandma Techno)