“I came out of prison with only one idea in mind: we must bear witness.” These words from Jane Evelyn Atwood resonate like a visceral commitment. Twenty-five years after its first publication, Too Much Time: Women in Prison returns in an expanded edition, enriched with previously unpublished photographs, two new texts by the photographer and editor Fabienne Pavia, a bilingual version, and a new cover. Published by Le Bec en l’air, this book remains one of the most moving visual pleas for human dignity.
“The ten years I spent in prisons were the best of my life.” Jane Evelyn Atwood immediately adds: “It wasn’t pleasant. It was fascinating. Painful, exhausting, but vital.” In her Paris studio, the American photographer speaks about the reissue of this landmark project. In a world where women remain overlooked in both justice and prison systems, the book returns like a slap in the face.
Between 1989 and 1999, Jane Evelyn Atwood photographed the lives of women incarcerated in forty prisons across nine countries, from France to Russia to the United States. Ten years of monumental work, often obstructed, always driven by a lucid rage: the need to make heard the voices of imprisoned women silenced by the system.
A closed world, and a visceral commitment
“Why did I do it? Because I am fascinated by closed worlds,” she explains. Before prisons, she had photographed sex workers on Rue des Lombards in Paris, blind children, and people living with HIV. But never had a subject consumed her so completely. “As soon as I saw the state of the prisons—horrible, medieval—I thought: this must be denounced.”
It began in 1989 with a commission from the Ministry of Justice: a book, Three Days in France, for the Bicentennial of the Revolution. She asked to photograph prisons. Access to men’s prisons was denied: “Because I was a woman.” Instead, she was sent to a small women’s facility in Toulon. She expected to find little there. What she encountered was indignity, despair—and an urgent ethical necessity. From that first day, she asked: why is no one speaking about these women? Why does their fate remain invisible?
The shock was immediate. Eight inmates. Their offenses? Often linked to men: accomplices, victims, manipulated. “I heard stories no one wanted to hear. I thought: I must tell this.” It marked the start of a decade-long journey: institutional mistrust, barriers to overcome. From France to the United States, Russia to the Czech Republic, she obtained, against all odds, unprecedented access. She photographed, listened, immersed herself. “I was happy in prisons. Not because it was easy. But because it was essential. It pulled me out of my own life.” Her approach was never that of a detached observer: “I wanted to understand. Understand who they were, what they had lived through, why they were there.”
Her rage came from the abyss between prison reality and public ignorance. Eighty-nine percent of women were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. Nearly 80% were mothers. Their sentences were often longer than men’s for the same or lesser offenses. Most had suffered abuse before prison: sexual, physical, psychological. “They are guilty of ignorance more than crime.” And their conditions were often worse than men’s: isolation, meaningless work, the absence of any activity. “In France in the 1990s, a man could spend twelve hours a day outside his cell. A woman? One hour in the yard, then back inside.” What she documented was humiliation, not rehabilitation. In France, toilets without partitions in shared cells. In Russia, women locked in wire cages.
When images become law
Some photographs became evidence. The most famous: a woman handcuffed to the delivery table in Alaska. She had given the photographer her consent. One day, Atwood returned to the prison to continue her work. The woman was gone. She had gone into premature labor and been taken to the hospital. “I ran to the hospital, she was still there, on the table, not yet delivered. She still wanted to be photographed. I went in without permission. I even clashed with the staff. But for me, what mattered was that the woman agreed. That was all that mattered. That’s how I made the entire series of photographs.”
These images were taken up by Amnesty International and helped ban this practice in seven U.S. states and in England. “It wasn’t only my images that changed things, but they helped prove the practice existed.” She adds: “Even if it changes nothing, you must take the photos. Bearing witness is resisting oblivion.” The photos speak. And sometimes, they make the walls bend. “If I’m proud of one photo, it’s that one,” she affirms.
Other images will never be shown. “Some were too harsh. When editing, I chose not to include them. Not for the public—for the women. They had to be protected.” The project came with consequences. She received threats, was taken to court by an inmate who withdrew consent despite having signed an authorization. Atwood won the case. But “psychologically, it was heavy. I couldn’t take pictures for some time afterward.”
Gradually, through encounters, Atwood felt the women begin to trust her. “When I realized, slowly, that these women were ready to confide part of their truth to me—not all, but enough to make a book—nothing could have stopped me,” she says. That trust, fragile and precious, pushed her forward. But when it came time to close this long project, the decision was painful: “At some point, I felt I had enough to express what I had seen, what I had lived. That’s when I knew it was time to stop.”
Can photography still change things?
“Rarely. But yes, sometimes. Even if it’s only a single image, it’s enough. What matters is to keep the trace. An honest photo, not manipulated, not staged.” Jane Evelyn Atwood defends rigorous photojournalism. “A documentary photo must be as close as possible to what you saw. Otherwise, it’s dishonest.” She rejects artifice, rejects staging—especially with strong scenes, like the woman injecting herself in her cell.
She also faced cultural contradictions in each country. “In the United States, I couldn’t photograph naked women,” she recalls. A selective modesty, which clashed with what she was allowed to photograph: “But the electric chair was perfectly acceptable.” A dissonance that speaks volumes about what societies choose to hide—or to show.
Black-and-white photography? A deliberate choice: “That’s how I see. For me, prison is black and white. I couldn’t have done it any other way.” In the new edition, Atwood added an unpublished photograph: a prisoner’s hand reaching toward a small poster that reads, Thank God we have rock’n’roll. She explains: “A prisoner had this image in her cell. I thought it was brilliant. I showed it to Fabienne [Pavia] and asked: ‘Can we put it at the very end of the book?’ She said yes, absolutely. And I often think, even in my own life: thank God we have rock’n’roll… Because the rest is completely crazy, it’s chaos.”
A burning relevance
Why republish Too Much Time today? “It was Fabienne Pavia who called me. She said: ‘This book is too important. It must continue to exist.’ She was right.” Since then, the situation has only worsened. “But what’s shocking is that it’s still relevant. I think in many cases it’s worse.” Atwood also points to changes in some countries, like Switzerland, where she recently met the director of a prison she had photographed. “I was told women are tougher than before. Some initiate crime. And drugs have exploded in detention.”
She recalls a truth she has carried all along: “Women in prison are punished twice. For their crime, and for having committed it as women.” With this reissue, Atwood has been able to take a different, more distanced look at her images: “When we made the book back then, I was still too close to what I had just lived. With the reissue, I was able to take a step back… to see the photos differently.”“This book is a bomb,” she says. “It must explode in other generations.” In Too Much Time, every image is a fragment of history. Jane Evelyn Atwood opened a world many prefer to ignore. Through her lens, these women—often guilty of having loved too much, suffered too much, or simply of being poor—reclaim a voice. Each photograph is a fragment of their story. A story that is always worth reading, always worth seeing. But it is also a feminist outcry. It emerges at a time when women’s rights, in many countries, are wavering. This reissue reminds us of the political urgency of looking at those who are imprisoned—often in the name of an order that had already broken them long before the bars.
Too much time: women in prison, by Jane Evelyn Atwood is available from Le bec en l’air for 45€.
