“It’s really my magnum opus,” says Richard Ross of the Juvenile in Justice project he has pursued nonstop for the past eight years. “It’s been the most punishing thing I’ve ever done, and the most rewarding.”
Ross has just installed Isolated, his new exhibition on the solitary confinement of juvenile offenders. The show consists of another set of Ross’s astonishing prison photographs, but at its center there’s something else, something three-dimensional and immersive: a scale model of an isolation cell. Inside it, and above the standard featureless cot that is the tiny room’s only furnishing, a loudspeaker wired to the ceiling pours forth a soundtrack of young men and women baring their souls in the process of explaining and justifying their wrecked lives.
The photos Ross takes are ordinarily designed to protect the privacy of his subjects, but his new installation was designed with an eye to invading the privacy of someone else — the viewer. “I like it that it’s distracting,” Ross says to me as the sound of taped testimony interrupts our conversation. “It should be distracting because that’s what life is like for these kids.”
