Night Exposures
Photographer Marni Shindelman’s series Restore the Night Sky illuminates America’s hidden detention centers from an unexpected angle.
One of the stunning aspects of the desert borderlands is the region’s dark sky—or rather, the vast array of stars that appears after night falls. As The Border Chronicle reported last year, this natural beauty is threatened by Customs and Border Protection, which has installed stadium lights along the U.S.-Mexico border wall at multiple locations in southern Arizona. If the agency turns on these lights, it will disorient migrating birds and leave small mammals exposed to predators.
The border wall isn’t border enforcement’s only contribution to light pollution, however. CBP’s sister agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and its private contractors deliberately build many of their detention centers in remote areas, putting them out of sight and out of mind from the vast majority of the American public. Yet these metaphorical dark spots on the map frequently interrupt dark-sky zones. In the ongoing series Restore the Night Sky, Marni Shindelman, a photographer and University of Georgia School of Art professor, trains her camera on these hidden places to document the impact of immigration detention across the rural United States.
The United States’ detention centers caught Shindelman’s attention in the summer of 2018. She was horrified by the crisis of family separation then underway. That fall, a friend who had spent the summer providing pro bono legal aid at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, showed her an image of the Texas plain and the town’s horizon at dusk, explaining to Shindelman that she couldn’t show her images of the detention facility itself because taking them was illegal.
Shindelman took the prohibition on photographing the detention centers as a challenge. She wanted to find a way to use her skills as a photographer to illuminate the vast immigrant detention system, which is the largest in the world, yet deliberately hidden from the view of most Americans. She worked alongside immigration advocates, following them “everywhere except into the detention center.”
One night in Texas, she set up her camera on the roof of a volunteer’s home to take a long-exposure photograph of a beloved tree in his yard. When she viewed the photograph, a strange line had appeared through the center. Though “imperceptible to the naked eye,” she writes in the introduction to Restore the Night Sky, it was “clearly apparent through the long exposure of a camera.”
She soon understood what it was: the edge of the glow of the detention center’s bright security lights, reaching far beyond the facility itself. The center had changed the quality of the town’s night sky. Suddenly, she had the answer to her quixotic quest to photograph the un-photographable: using long exposures to reveal the detention centers’ impact on the night sky would be a way of capturing them obliquely and drawing attention to their presence even as they sought to hide.
Restore the Night Sky traverses the U.S. gulag archipelago from the Joshua Trees of Adelanto, California, to the swamps and pines of Louisiana and Shindelman’s home state of Georgia. In Golden State Annex, McFarland, CA, the line between the area reached by the detention facility’s lights and the darkness of night bisects a white garage. In West Texas Detention Facility, Sierra Blanca, Texas, it falls across the cactus-studded desert. Eventually, Shindelman plans to photograph all of the private detention facilities in the country.
Though detention is often associated with the desert Southwest, the Gulf Coast region of east Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia holds 15 of the country’s 20 largest facilities. How little the general public hears about a facility like Adams County Detention Center in Natchez, Mississippi, which has an average daily population of more than 2,000 people, speaks to the success with which these jails have been hidden from public view. Recently, however, immigrant detention in the Southeast came into the public eye because of protests demanding the release of political prisoners Mahmoud Khalil, Alireza Doroudi, and Rümeysa Öztürk, who were all sent to a facility in Jena, Louisiana.
In Shindelman’s photographs from America’s South, thick with pine trees, the line between darkness and the lights of the detention facility blurs in the contours of the forest. In “Folkston ICE Processing Center, Folkston, GA,” it glows as bright as a full moon; in Irwin County Detention Center, Ocilla, GA, it looks like an unnatural sunrise, illuminating the swamplands in the foreground from below.
Shindelman includes the towns’ detainee and civilian populations in the captions of her photographs. In many cases, the number of people incarcerated approaches that of those living free: Pine Prairie, Louisiana, has a detainee capacity of 700 in a town of 1,331; Estancia, New Mexico, has 910 detention center beds and 1,478 residents. The harsh institutional lighting that invades these towns and their rural surroundings mirrors the slow invasive growth of the carceral system. The presence of nearby jails and their secret, walled-off worlds becomes normalized, but they are far from normal.
In the cycles of night and day, summer and winter, the rhythms of sunlight and darkness keep the world in balance. Dark skies matter not only to the well-being of wildlife but also to that of humans—just as immigration enforcement doesn’t just impact asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants but society as a whole.
Shindelman’s Restore the Night Sky is a meditation not just on dark skies but on another kind of darkness: the growing network of hidden prisons tucked away in America’s small towns and once-wild places. Her requiem for the lost tranquility of pitch-dark night is also a haunting demonstration that such facilities disrupt both the natural and social order. It should be a wake-up call for us all.
Our nation has dishonored itself. Thank you for your informative postings.
Thank you for “exposing” truth. 💓🙏