In Britain, the statistical profile of people with learning disabilities and autism inside the criminal justice system is stark: those with a learning disability are more likely to be arrested than the general population, and they account for a substantial share of young people in custody. *Out of the Shadows*, published by Dewi Lewis in 2018 in association with the West Bromwich arts organisation Multistory, builds its argument out of that tension between numbers and persons. Polly Braden photographs; Sally Williams writes seven extended stories, and three first-hand accounts appear alongside. Across 128 pages and some eighty colour plates, the book asks how individuals arrived in prison and what befell them there.
Braden came to the project after *Great Interactions*, her earlier book and national exhibition on everyday life for people with autism and learning disabilities in educational and care settings. *Out of the Shadows* turns to those who fell outside adequate support. The work was commissioned by Multistory with an accompanying exhibition produced with Midlands Arts Centre, where it was shown from September to November 2018. The book’s sequencing draws its force from proximity—faces, rooms, documents—rather than from the taxonomy of the case study.
The publisher’s format is modest and deliberate: a softback with a double-flap cover, 260 by 200 mm, printed as a working document as much as an art object. Williams’s narratives and the first-person testimonies give the photographs a context that a caption cannot; the photographs return the pressure of evidence to the writing. That pairing, rather than any single image, is the book’s method.
For collectors of documentary and socially engaged photography, the interest lies in Braden’s sustained attention to a population that photographic culture tends to render either statistically or sentimentally. The Multistory commission places the book within a commissioning practice that has supported work by Martin Parr, Susan Meiselas, David Goldblatt and others. As an early and concentrated instance of that programme’s method, it repays close looking.
