The San Quentin Project collects a largely unseen visual record of daily life inside one of America-s oldest and largest prisons, demonstrating how this archive of the state is now being used to teach visual literacy and process the experience of incarceration.In 2011, Nigel Poor-artist, educator, and cocreator of the acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle-began teaching a history of photography class through the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. Neither books nor cameras were allowed into the facility, so an unorthodox course with a range of inventivemapping exercises ensued: students crafted -verbal photographs- of memories for which they had no visual documentation, and annotated iconic images from different artists. After the first semester, Poor says, -one student told me he could now see fascination everywhere in San Quentin.-
When Poor received access to thousands of negatives in the prison-s archive, made by corrections officers of a former
