Closing of Vinny and David: Life and Incarceration of a Family

Join ART WORKS Projects for the closing of Vinny and David: Life and Incarceration of a Family, a five-year photo essay by 2017 Emerging Lens winner Isadora Kosofsky. This essay documents one family’s experiences with recurring periods of juvenile and adult incarceration. Beverages and food from Wow Bao provided. Presented by AWP’s NextGen Committee.

For the past five years, I have documented the relationship between families and incarceration, focusing on lost intimacy and love as a locus to investigate humanistic elements of the criminal justice system. In the midst of understanding shattered and mended familial bonds in my present life, Vinny and David comments on private questions about the nature of brotherly bonds and alienation. – Isadora Kosofsky

Vinny and David began when Isadora Kosofsky encountered Vinny, then age 13, as he was being booked into a juvenile detention center for stabbing his mother’s assailant in 2012. Since that time, Kosofsky has forged an ongoing relationship with Vinny, his older brother David, and the rest of their family as she documents their navigation of life both inside and outside of New Mexico’s juvenile and adult prison systems.

Photo: Isadora Kosofsky, Albuquerque, 2012. Vinny eats his first meal in the detention center cafeteria.