Jane Evelyn Atwood was born in New York and has been living in France since 1971. Her work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of their exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us don’t know or choose to ignore. Atwood limits her stories to those that truly compel her, devoting to each subject the time necessary to explore it in depth. In 1989 she started to photograph incarcerated women, managing to gain access to some of the world’s harshest penitentiaries and jails, including death rows. This monumental ten-year undertaking remains the definitive photographic work on women in prison to date. Atwood describes her work method as “obsessive”. She does not move on to a new subject until she feels she has completely grasped the one at hand and her own relationship to it, and until she believes that her pictures reflect this understanding.