About Suitable Placement

“Suitable Placement” is the expression used when trying to place a minor who is either in distress or in trouble with the authorities. I am doing research on the placement and treatment of juveniles in America and the facilities that house, treat, and assist them.

I have visited these “troubled-teen” facilities across the United States and have taken photographs of the spaces that the children live in, work in, and study in. I have made sure to keep the children’s identities unknown, by either photographing them from behind or obscuring their faces.

I am not working with an agenda, but am simply recording what exists.

To date, I have photographed Angel’s Flight (L.A.), group homes, foster homes, ICE juvenile holding, Los Prietos Boys Camp, LAPD, SFPD, EL Paso PD, Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, Santa Barbara Juvenile Correctional facility, Sexual Assault Response Team Examination Rooms, interview and exam rooms for sexually abused children, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, Children of the Night (Van Nuys), JHS, Montessori classrooms, Maryvale (a former orphanage), CPS interview rooms, El Paso Juvenile Courtrooms, half-way houses, reform schools, maximum security Giddings, TX, lock-down and nonlock-down shelters, SW Keys, ORR, ICE, DHS, and CBP to name a few. I have primarily focused on kids that are not the “Kids R Us” type of juvenile, but rather minors that become part of a system because they have failed, or their families have failed them, or their society has failed them. Earl Dunlap, the Director of Cooke County Detention Center, welcomed me to his facility with the words: “Welcome to the gates of hell.”

I am trying to get the broadest range of images and texts. I recently photographed a family that has two grown sons, yet took in two separated brothers and two separated sisters in foster care in order to reunite the siblings and start a second family. So there are some positive and quite inspirational portions of my research as well.

I have been a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara for the past 30 years and have published more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles and journals. I have been awarded NEA and Fulbright scholar grants, and this current body of work exists under the generous funding of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In the past few years on a related project, I have worked with the military in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and on warships during war games. I am always thought to be impartial, objective, unbiased, and fair. I am always invited back.

This body of work will culminate in a book, website, lecture and collection of essays to be published in 2011. The work was done with partial support from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.