Operation Jurassic
Tuesday, 09 April 2019 00:01
Written by Roxana Allison
Operation Jurassic is an eight-year-long collaborative personal project between sister and brother photographers Roxana and Pablo Allison that portrays their emotional journey leading up to, during and after Pablo’s imprisonment in the UK. Their visual account uncovers feelings and the passing of time through legal documentation, paperwork, letters, diaries, drawings and photographs, offering the viewer an intimate approach of the legal process whilst quietly raising issues on freedom of expression, graffiti and the criminal justice system.
The project emerges from Roxana and Pablo’s need to detach from the situation they were faced with, but as time passed, it proved to bind them closer together resulting in a tight knit photographic collaboration with its own challenges. A series of issues from the past flared up alongside revealing unseen aspects of their persona allowing them to retrace and understand their relationship.
A self-published book was part funded with a small grant from the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (NCJAA) bursary and financial aid from the Digital Women’s Archive North (DWAN) and launched at Impressions Gallery Photo Book Fair (Bradford) in October 2018.
Operation Jurassic is an eight-year-long collaborative personal project between sister and brother photographers Roxana and Pablo Allison that portrays their emotional journey leading up to, during and after Pablo’s imprisonment in the UK. Their visual account uncovers feelings and the passing of time through legal documentation, paperwork, letters, diaries, drawings and photographs, offering the viewer an intimate approach of the legal process whilst quietly raising issues on freedom of expression, graffiti and the criminal justice system.
The project emerges from Roxana and Pablo’s need to detach from the situation they were faced with, but as time passed, it proved to bind them closer together resulting in a tight knit photographic collaboration with its own challenges. A series of issues from the past flared up alongside revealing unseen aspects of their persona allowing them to retrace and understand their relationship.
A self-published book was part funded with a small grant from the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (NCJAA) bursary and financial aid from the Digital Women’s Archive North (DWAN) and launched at Impressions Gallery Photo Book Fair (Bradford) in October 2018.