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| Avenal, CA State Prison, 1997 |
Stephen Tourlentes received his BFA from Knox College and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he is currently a visiting professor of photography. His work is included in many collections including the Princeton University Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Revolution Gallery, Michigan; Cranbook Art Museum, Michigan; and S.F. Camerawork, among others. Tourlentes has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Polaroid Corporation Grant, Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants, MacDowell Colony Fellowships, and was a finalist for the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize for 2010. His work is included in the forthcoming exhibition "Night Vision" that will open at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on April 26th, 2011.
Since 1996, Tourlentes has photographed penitentiaries glowing with security lights at night in the context of their surrounding landscape in his series Of Lengths and Measures: Prison and the American Landscape. A large portfolio of this work can be enjoyed on his website here.
Two excellent existing online interviews explore Tourlentes' background and work. There’s a 2008 interview with Jess T. Dugan on Big RED & Shiny here and a second with Pete Brook on Prison Photography published in 2009 here. Both have granted Fototazo republishing permission. Tourlentes has answered new questions for Fototazo designed to complement these two previous interviews and this article draws from all three sources, sequences and combines them, to form an extensive look into Tourlentes' work.