In Afterimage's December 2025 issue, Jackson Davidow and Lee Wormald look back at Jack Lueders-Booth’s photography education program at Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham. From 1978 to 1985, Lueders-Booth taught incarcerated women and men the magic of the darkroom, giving them the opportunity to produce and circulate prints with each other and with loved ones in and outside the prison. His original plan did not involve photographing at the prison himself, but after getting to know his students over the course of the first year, taking portraits and documenting everyday scenes of incarcerated life became a crucial part of his artistic practice. He also developed an oral history project.

In this essay, Davidow and Wormald offer the first comprehensive history of the work of Lueders-Booth and his students, grasping it as a counter-archive of carcerality, one that is defined by a sense of co-authorship. The shared acts of making photographs and cultivating relationships open onto new historical narratives of carcerality and community.

Afterimage December 2025, [Volume 52, Issue 4]

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