When Alyse Emdur was a little girl she would accompany her mother and sister to prison to visit her older brother, who was serving time for car theft and drug possession. In 2005 she came across a picture of herself and her brother posing in front of a romantic tropical beach scene. Other photos show her brother with and without family members in front of a bucolic stream, a cozy cottage and lush greenery. The hand-painted murals in prison classrooms and portrait studios record fantasies of freedom. To the prisoners and their families these scenes keep at bay the intense feelings of powerlessness, shame and loss caused by crime and incarceration.
For the images in this book, Alyse Emdur revisited this childhood experience. She contacted prisoners via pen pal websites and asked them for existing photographs of them and their families posing in front of idyllic backdrops. 
Prison Landscapes combines this collection with Emdur’s own photographs: she gained access to ten correctional facilities in Pennsylvania, New York and Florida to create new pictures of hand-painted backdrops in their “natural” prison environment (gaining access to prisons has become increasingly difficult for journalists and documentarians. Tough-on-crime policies, mass incarceration, prison overcrowding and accusations of human rights violations have caused administrators to tighten the lid.)
Prison Landscapes is a collection of photographs of prison inmates representing themselves in front of visiting room backdrops. Such backdrops, often painted by talented inmates, are used within the prisons as portrait studios. As inmates and their visitors pose for photos in front of these idealized landscapes they pretend, for a brief moment, that they are someplace else. The photographs are given to these visitors as gifts to take home and remember the faces of their loved ones while they are incarcerated.
Prison Landscapes explores this little known and largely physically inaccessible genre of painting and portraiture seen only by inmates, visitors, and prison employees. Created specifically for escape and self-representation, the idealized paintings of tropical beaches, fantastical waterfalls, mountain vistas, and cityscapes invite sitters to perform fantasies of freedom.
Prison Landscapes offers viewers a rare opportunity to see Americas incarcerated population, not through the usual lens of criminality, but through the eyes of inmates loved ones.
“The collection was inspired by a photograph I found of myself at age five posing in front of a tropical beach scene while visiting my brother in prison. Since discovering this first portrait in my own family album in 2005, I have invited hundreds of prisoners to send me photographs for inclusion in this collection.”
- Alyse Emdur