The following is a review or an essay about Sara Bennett’s The Bedroom Project http://www.lifeafterlifeinprison.com/bedroom
Sara Bennett’s first book of photography, “Spirit on the Inside,” doubles as a collection of character evidence. Published in 2013, it portrays women who, years after being released from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, in New York, still treasure memories of their fellow-inmate Judith Clark, a getaway driver in the Brink’s robbery, in 1981, in Rockland County, which left two police officers and one security guard dead. At the time of the book’s publication, Clark, a former member of the Weather Underground, was serving seventy-five years to life. She was, at once, Bennett’s original muse and her highest-profile client. During the photographer’s first career, as a public defender, she often represented women condemned to decades-long sentences; in her work as an artist, she has made a point of portraying these women, in order to protest the notion that only “nonviolent felons” and “low-level drug offenders,” as she told me recently, deserve the public’s mercy. “I wanted to say, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” Bennett said of her subjects. “ ‘They deserve a second chance as well.’ ” Read the rest of the article …