The Parameters Of Our Cage

In January 2020, Alec Soth received a letter from Chris Fausto Cabrera, an inmate of the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Rush City, asking the photographer to engage in a dialogue. This sparked an expansive and insightful correspondence over the following nine months, set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter Movement, and growing unrest, which reaches to the heart of contemporary America. In amongst their exchanges of personal histories and shared influences – from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and André 3000 to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet – developed a searing investigation of the redemptive power of art and the imagination, justice and accountability, life inside America’s prisons, and the astonishing capacity of empathy and curiosity to bring two people together. In December 2023, a board led by the Minnesota Governor voted unanimously for the commutation of Cabrera’s sentence. This expanded edition of The Parameters of Our Cage includes a new conversation between Cabrera and Soth, recorded when they met in person for the first time, which discusses confronting life post-incarceration.