At the James Harris Gallery through March 17, Captured Youth is the result of a decade-long program that allowed Davis to teach the art of photography to incarcerated minors across the state system.

The mood is set by antiseptic-clean architecture and beautifully grim mugshot portraits. The portraits, full of skin tones, contrast with the facility’s scrubbed-white walls. The photo “10, 11, 12, 13 & 14, Intensive Management Unit, Green Hill,” brings these contrasts to the fore: in a corridor of locked, metal, whitewashed units, framing the out-looking incarcerated faces of youth, are viewing panes, scratch-scored and face-sized. This theme of barriers and surfaces is presented also through the extremely shallow range of camera focus in the portraits: What do we present to others? Where, and by what, can we be imprisoned, even within the prison of our selves?

Cell 12, Green Hill, 2000, Archival Ink Jet Print, 40” x 50”, originally printed in color.

Since the subjects’ personal histories and crimes are not given, we’re only offered a superficial introduction: their first names. Davis says he didn’t ask them why they were held; he didn’t want to introduce a sense of judgment in the relationships. The feeling of resilience in the portraits may stem from this silence: the youth, loath to bare their turmoil, bear a resolve forged into the surface tension we read on their faces.

Along with the portraits, Davis explores the different techniques for maintaining a sense of self and confronting or sinking into alienation, through candid, in-cell photos. “Cell, Ramann Hall,” shows a girl masking her face with her hands, clothed in bright orange in a completely white room, while in “Cell, Intensive Management Unit,” the youth is covered in a white blanket, leaving only feet and ankles to draw attention to the white-muffled form on the cot. Davis says when he was working at Green Hill, kids spent 23-hour days inside these closet-like compartments, devoid of contact or circulated air.

Davis appears to propose a dynamic feedback loop, where withdrawal is a product of the isolating cells, and simultaneously a social survival technique of masking strife and personal history.

In an interview, Davis said, “You couldn’t imagine how much it meant to the kids to have a picture of themselves in their cell with them. Any expression of individuality was huge.” He notes many pictures were censored for gang signs.

Davis also notes that many shots were not allowed to be taken, including the most intense trials the youth underwent: being cuffed in the fetal position, near-naked on bare concrete. “I recognize that my existing images don’t begin to portray the severity or intensity…but I think that at least hint at the reality,” he writes in his artist’s statement.

The project was first sponsored by The Experimental Gallery in 1997, an organization bringing artists into youth correctional facilities. Davis says he hopes that his pictures refresh the scant documentation from the state historical archive, which contains images mostly a century old. He hopes they will remain as historical and social documents of how the state takes care of its incarcerated youth.