A new short film from director Deborah S. Esquenazi highlights Bruce Jackson’s visits to 1960s “prison farms” in Texas. Jackson, a renowned folklorist, documentarian and photographer, was one of few documentarians to have received unprecedented access to the southern prison farms, which were modeled after the American slave plantation and occupied lands that plantations stood on before the Civil War. Jackson studied black convict work songs and folk culture, highlighting the parallels between slave plantations and these now-vanished prison farms.
WAKE*UP, DEAD MEN: A Retrospective of Bruce Jackson’s Prison Farm Photography, 1965-1975, coming to KLRU on Oct. 1, showcases Jackson’s photography tracing the roots of the prison farm into today’s massive prison system and industrial prison complexes. The film will be available online through March 2016.
Deborah S. Esquenazi is an Austin-based documentary film and radio producer, instructor, and video artist. She was a Sundance Documentary Film Fellow at the Sundance Festival in 2014, and Sundance Creative Producing Fellow in 2015. She is currently working on a documentary about the San Antonio Four, four women who were convicted of sexually assaulting two young girls but were later released from prison and are still fighting for full exoneration today. Visit Esquenazi’s website for details on this upcoming project and her other work.