Description
Shortlisted for the Singapore International Photography Festival
Jan Banning’s latest book is a multi-layered case study of the US Criminal Justice system and mass incarceration. In it he delves into a three decades old murder case in Georgia. On April 14, 1992, 22-year-old Christina Boyer was arrested for the murder of her toddler daughter Amber and sentenced to life in prison. Banning questions her guilt.
The book presents the results of his extensive research. Combining documentary as well as staged photos with texts, it unravels the role of the media, presents analyses by medical professionals, and gives Banning’s own visual interpretation of elements of the story. Besides, Banning invited the ‘subject’ of the project, Christina Boyer, to be an active participant in it. Boyer allowed Banning to disclose pages from her diaries and also gives viewers an insight into her inner world by writing her associations with his photos from Georgia, thereby giving an impression of how such an incarceration influences one’s perception of the visual world.
Stylistically, the book contains references to film noir, 19th-century Romantic landscapes and 17th Century Vanitas still lifes. It poses deep questions about about objectivism versus subjectivism. In the end, the audience is challenged to judge for themselves. The entirety of the artistic visual interpretations and documentation collected presents a major political story in a unique way.
Jan Banning (b.1954) is a Dutch artist/photographer based in the Netherlands. His parents were born and raised in the colonial Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Banning studied social and economic history at the Radboud University of Nijmegen.
In 2008, Banning gained worldwide recognition with his critically acclaimed book Bureaucratics (government offices in eight countries worldwide), edited by Martin Parr, that garnered rave reviews as well as a World Press Photo award. Often, his work has a personal starting point. Traces of War: Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways (2003) contains 24 portraits and interviews of Dutch and Indonesian former WWII forced laborers in South East Asia - including Banning's father. Comfort Women (2010) is a series of close-up portraits of Indonesian women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during WWII. In The Sweating Subject (2018) he puts an ironic twist on colonial photography. The small series National Identities is an attack on xenophobic populism. Law & Order (2015), an in-depth look at the intricacies of the judiciary in four countries on four continents, paved the way to The Verdict.
Banning has had more than 80 solo exhibitions around the world. His work is included in many public, private and corporate collections, including those of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Forward Thinking Museum in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Berlin. Since May 2018, he has been working full-time as an 'artivist' on the case of Christina Boyer.