Humanist portraits of Polk

RALEIGH -- Photographer David Simonton will tell you that he felt no immediate affinity for Polk Youth Center.

Artistic curiosity first led him to the former juvenile prison on a cold Sunday in 1999. He navigated his way through some open gates into the compound, snapped a few quick shots and left.

"[Polk] was the kind of place that you wanted to look at, but you didn't want to look," Simonton recalled. "My heart was in my throat the whole time I was there. I didn't expect I'd ever go back."

However, within a year of that initial encounter Simonton found himself becoming intimately acquainted with the 80-year-old facility's rusting bars and peeling paint through a commission from the N.C. Museum of Art.

"We wanted an interpretive documentation," said Huston Paschal, the project's administrator and retired associate curator at NCMA. "[David's] predilection for the aged and infirm as subject matter and his humanist approach made him the ideal choice for what [the museum] had in mind for Polk."

Before its demolition in 2003, Polk Youth Center was within walking distance of the museum. Its low-slung barracks were originally intended to house military trainees during World War I. After the war it was repurposed as a correctional facility, first for men and later for male youths 19- to 21-years-old.

Polk's reputation as a prison was shady at best and peppered with accounts of escaped inmates, overcrowding and mistreatment. In spring 1993 The News & Observer exposed Polk Youth Center's conditions in a front-page investigative report ("Behind Bars, Behind the Times") The facility closed in 1997. In 2003, the buildings were torn down and the land became part of the park surrounding the art museum.

A box filled with keys gave Simonton unlimited access to the prison's two dozen dilapidated buildings. He made more than 90 trips to the site from 2000 to 2003, and captured it in every season, hour and type of weather.

"I live just a couple of miles from Polk so it was really easy to go over there when the light seemed interesting," he said.

The black-and-white photos lack the clichéd sensationalism that one might expect of a place with such a macabre history. Instead, Simonton's photos are intimate humanist contemplations on light and composition.

"While I'm not blind to context, what matters to me first is the picture, the abstracted image," he said, adding, "If these pictures offer a story, that's great, but not my first concern."

Simonton makes the technical side of his work look effortless, though his process is anything but. Beyond setting up the shots, paying attention to light balance and exposure, he also still shoots with film, spending hours in darkrooms extracting life from ghostly negatives.

And intended or not, his photographs do invite narratives and give the impression of a sudden cessation of daily life at Polk Youth Center. Simonton's photos stare unblinkingly at stained mattresses slumped over bunk frames and half rolls of toilet paper propped behind dry toilets.

One photograph depicts a broken school chair outside on a snowy day. The small piece of furniture is out of place and exposed, mediating between a black-fingered shrub in the foreground and fog-hazed power transformer behind it. The image's soft contrast and overall wash of white belie a tension that exists between the inanimate subjects.

"Even though David might see his subject in formal terms as an abstraction, he approaches it in human terms, with respect -- one might even say affection," Paschal said during her introduction of Simonton at a recent museum talk. "His prints evoke the spirit and soul of the place."

Looking for a venue

Five of the Polk Youth Center photos were acquired for NCMA's permanent collection. There are more than 100 photos in this series, many of which have never been exhibited.

"I'm still looking for the right venue to show them," he said.

In the meantime, some the work can be seen in an ongoing online exhibition coordinated by Pete Brook of the Prison Photography blog. The exhibit is free and viewers have access to 20 of Simonton's photos as well as an artist narrative of the project.