Kelly Poe / Marie Mason. Fifth Estate

In 2006 Poe wrote to seven incarcerated environmental activists and ask a question: What are the places that you return to inside’s your mind’s eye, the sacred places that you visualize that help keep you sane? I’ll go there and make a picture for you. She offered to be their eyes.

The responses were intimate, emotional, and revealed the story of a 21st century political witch-hunt. These letters, collectively and honestly, told the story about our country at war, the environmental crisis, and our humanity. In 1996, the FBI began Operation Backfire, an investigation into actions claimed by the Earth Liberation Front. Five years later, the ELF was classified as a top domestic terrorist threat. The environmental movement has referred to this investigation as the Green Scare; like a contemporary version of the McCarthy Era’s Red Scare, communities are being torn apart and non-violent people are being imprisoned as domestic terrorists.

Poe travelled across the county to find and photograph wild landscapes across the country that blur the edges of documentary, pictorialism, and conceptual photographic genres and recontextualize it with a political vital presence.

In collaboration with Kelly Poe’s, For the Wild; will be over 30 original artworks by Marie Mason mailed from prison to friends, family and outside supporters. Mason was sentenced to 22 years on February 5, 2009 for two acts of eco-sabotage, the longest sentence of any Green Scare prisoner.

Kelly Poe / Marie Mason
Fifth Estate