In Prison Air.

The Cells of Holmesburg Prison. Photographs by Thomas Roma. Foreword by John Szarkowski. Text by Allen M. Hornblum.

Powerhouse Books, New York, 2005. 96 pp., 44 duotone illustrations, 11x14".

In 1999 photographer Thomas Roma found himself within the walls of Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison, one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, doing a special photographic project for Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory. During downtime Roma wandered through this nineteenth-century fortress, walking in and out of many of its seven hundred or so cells. After Holmesburg’s inception in 1896—on the occasion of which one Philadelphia reporter warned, “Abandon all hope all ye who enter here”—it quickly became the prison for Philadelphia’s worst criminals, eventually packing up to five prisoners into six by eight foot cells designed for single- occupancy. After leaving the site, Roma found his mind often inhabiting the space of the prison with its halls of flaking paint and graffiti-covered cells. Overwhelmed by the evidence of the lives spent inside those small rooms, Roma returned to photograph on his own, creating the images now collected for In Prison Air: The Cells of Holmesburg Prison.

Holmesburg, closed in 1997, is perhaps most well known for a series of scientific experiments carried out on its prisoners over a period of twenty-five years. Sponsored by the U.S. Army, the CIA, the University of Pennsylvania, The Dow Chemical Company, and Johnson & Johnson, the experiments tested the effects of substances ranging from deodorants and hair dyes to LSD and BZ, a compound ten times as strong as LSD, to radioactive isotopes and chemical warfare agents. These tests also included a special climate chamber designed for the study of skin diseases encountered during World War II. Dr. Albert Kligman, the architect of the human testing program at Holmesburg, saw the prison as “acres of skin.…like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Now, Kligman’s tests are considered by many to be one of the most explicit violations of the Nuremberg Code, as undereducated and illiterate prisoners almost certainly did not realize the consequences of their consent. The cells are now empty of the men that endured their squalor, but their presence remains through the detritus and graffiti accumulated over the prison’s century-long history, etched indelibly into Roma’s master lens.
Thomas Roma’s ninth book is a straightforward document of a twisted place, Philadelphia’s shuttered Holmesburg Prison. The prison’s peeling interior skin of cracked paint, bathed in slit-windowed light, simultaneously reminds the viewer of the dungeons of the Inquisition and the voluntary visionary seclusion of Fra Angelico’s monastic cell. Roma finds a strange beauty in the decrepit remains of the unstoried lives lived in each tiny compartment. The institutional impoverishment embodied in the sinks, iron bedsteads and commodes is offset by the photographer’s careful scrutiny of layered graffiti and tattered magazine photographs. Like incarcerated people everywhere, the prisoners obviously struggled to maintain their identity in the face of the grinding forces working to enforce their anonymity. Perhaps surprisingly, the inmates of this outpost of hell seem to have had heaven on their minds more often than not. There is relatively little sexual imagery, but references to the passage of time, and to eternity, are ubiquitous. Expressions of faith run the gamut, sprinkled among scrawled calendars, untutored drawings and even amateur hieroglyphs. As a ruin, Holmesburg is picturesque, but its meanings are more nuanced: the prison was the site of a 25-year series of human experiments, in which a variety of consumer products and dangerous chemicals were tested on illiterate inmates by academic, military, intelligence and commercial entities. The addition of this layer of suffering lends the stains, scrawls, and drooling lines of rust in the photographs a more ominous cast. In light of Holmesburg’s history, Roma’s choice of title, drawn from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading , is all too apt: The vilest deeds like poison-weeds / Bloom well in prison-air: / It is only what is good in Man / That wastes and withers there: / Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate / And the Warder is Despair. PHIL HARRIS

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