Thursday 21 January 2010

Prison is a place / part 2

I asked Joe to have his fellow prisoners represent the letter in one of his poems. He was to write each letter of the alphabet on a t-shirt and hand it to his inmates. They were then asked to model the shirts and subsequently polaroid pictures would be taken by the prison photographer. A different letter in every photo. I paid him two hundred dollars, wich was sent to cover the expenses of the materials. The cash was then placed in an aluminium wrap and posted to Joe´s mother, who would in turn transfer the money to Joe. Three months later I received a reply, but inside the envelope were just three Polaroid images with the letters: A, B and C. The only word i could compose was "CAB"....



I decided to beat them at their own game by telling Joe I could probably get two-hundred euros for every three letters of the eventual poem which consisted of sixty-one letters - could fetch up to 4066 dollars. Since one of the prisoners once told me that you can never get a 50 / 50 deal because that menat the one that proposes the deal must be a loser. I offered to split the cash in quarters and give 1/4 to the prisoners, keeping the other 3/4 for myself. Two weeks later I received all of the missing letters of the alphabet.

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