Cotton pickers, Ferguson Unit, Texas,

1967–69, printed 1979

<p>Danny Lyon’s <em>Cotton pickers</em> 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<br>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. </p><p><strong><em>Katie Kuhlman, Class of 2023</em></strong><br></p>

<p>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. <em>Cotton pickers</em> 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 <em>Cotton pickers</em> 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. </p> <p><em>Cotton pickers</em> 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. </p> <p><strong><em>Jamal Maddox, Class of 2017</em></strong></p>