Title: Prison Library

Photographer: Anne Ferran

Date of publication:  2014

Place of Publication: Sydney, Australia

Language: English

Dimensions of book: 170 x 225 mm

Number of pages: 72

Edition size: 300

ISBN: 978 0 646 91427 5

Retail price: $25 (at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth WA until 19 April 2014)

Summary of Project:

Prison Library assembles traces of the former Fremantle Prison Library in Western Australia. It is the outcome of Anne Ferran’s search for evidence of a library that once existed inside Fremantle Prison. The library existed until the closure of the maximum-security, convict-built prison in 1991, with the last two decades of its operation being the most active and sucessful.

The evidence collected in the book includes archival documents, reports, 1970s photographs, objects, books and Ferran’s photographs of the library space as it exists now.

The book also aims to convey something of the character of the library which was – for it’s time and situation – innovative and progressive as well as posessing features that were homespun, improvised and eccentric.