“McCormick and Calhoun have documented the soul of New Orleans and a vanishing Louisiana—from sugar cane cutters, dockworkers, and sweet potato harvesters to the displacement of African Americans after Katrina. Their work documents Black church traditions and community rites alongside the brutal realities of Angola prison. ‘Angola’ is a former slave-labor plantation turned State Penitentiary, named after the African nation from which “the most profitable” enslaved people were kidnapped.

The body of work they call Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex, began in the early 1980s and continues today. The series serves as both historical record and testimony of life at Angola also called “The Farm”. It is an 18,000-acre prison farm where inmates are traded like chattel amongst wardens of neighboring penitentiaries. Although the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery in 1865, its prohibition of forced labor does not apply to convicted inmates. Their work, Slavery; The Prison Industrial Complex, sheds light on the “criminal justice”system, of forced labor under the guns of white men on horseback, in Louisiana’s Angola state prison.

Calhoun and McCormick’s work restores visibility and humanity to a population often forgotten by the public at large.”