The women in the photographs are hard around the eyes, the look people get when they spend too many years on the street, too many years stoked on meth, too many years behind bars, maybe too many years alive.
“You would not believe some of their stories,” said Susan Madden Lankford, the photographer behind the images. “The level of despair is just astonishing.”
The photos appear in her new book, “Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time.” Lankford, a former Denver resident who lives in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., is set to appear at 7:30 tonight at the Tattered Cover in LoDo.
“I didn’t do this to be a sympathetic portrait of these women, but to show the public what goes on in jail and how people get stuck in this cycle,” Lankford said.
We were sitting in the Avenue Grill. Her husband was up the street, minding their 40-foot RV. They are on the road, plugging the book and enjoying a freedom some of her subjects will never see again. Lankford, a 5-foot-2 dynamo with just a few streaks of gray in her brown hair, has come a long way.
She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1970. Plans to go to medical school went by the wayside when she married her husband, a real estate developer. The couple lived near Bowles Lake in Bow Mar from 1971 to 1984.
Lankford took up photography. She studied with Ansel Adams at one of the master’s Yosemite workshops and later opened a portrait studio.
But she came to find that work unengaging.
When one of her three daughters was nearly trampled to death by a horse, Lankford decided she “wanted to become engaged in work that was more real.”
And what is more real than people doing hard time?
Lankford spent two years assembling the book’s photos and interviews.
Born of a 35mm camera and black-and-white film, her images conjure the starkness of Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, the legendary chronicler of New York street life.
“I learned so much after breaking out of the protective world of portraiture, which is cozy work,” she said. “Getting immersed in the criminal justice system, both the prisoners and the staff members, I met some incredible people.
“There were terrific people. And some not so terrific.”
Although Lankford feels for the harsh upbringings many of her subjects endured, her sympathy has its limits. She spent enough time around cons to develop a clear-eyed view of crime and its consequences.
“Criminals are, at heart, manipulators,” she said. “One way or the other, manipulation is what they do.”
I asked her about the book’s title. She recalled how an inmate called her over to complain about maggots in her sweet potatoes.
“There were no maggots in the sweet potatoes,” Lankford said. “She was just so eager for contact she made it up to have something to talk about.
“A lot of people in these pages are stuck in childhood behavior. They’re incredibly needy emotionally, and some wind up back in jail because it’s the only home they know.”
As of 2006, 203,100 women were incarcerated in the United States, according to the Department of Justice.
“Our society is not as well as we’d like to think,” Lankford said.
That is something she sees in black and white.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
