Stay Safe Out There

“All I really get to see is stuff on t.v. and not what the normal world looks like”—Collin Davis, ZEITmagazin

Collin Davis has been behind bars for eighteen years; he has been sentenced to at least forty-five years' imprisonment. His brother's girlfriend, the photographer Chantal Seitz (b. Hardheim, 1993; lives and works in Berlin) asked him what he wanted to see of the world. It was the beginning of a pen friendship and a dialogue about seeing and reality inside and outside the prison.

Stay Safe Out There is the result of an engrossing correspondence. The artist's book shows how Seitz and Davis use photography to think and communicate about the world on both sides of the prison's walls and how the corrections system determines who may see what and how it may be seen. Based on letters, emails, series of photographs—which Seitz captures as requested by Davis—as well as facsimiles of leaflets advertising convenience goods to inmates, Google Street View shots of the prison's walls, and portraits of Davis himself, the book interweaves the two protagonists' realities. A searching exchange of ideas on seeing and not seeing, on isolation and the capitalism of the prison industry, it frames a perspective that is both personal and collective on current debates over reforms to the criminal justice system designed to strengthen prisoners' rights.