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Last autumn I listened to an episode from the 1999 ‘Lock Up’ series of This American Life, which explored the way prisoners represent their identities visually once they have been released During the podcast, an ex-detainee explained that during incarceration he and his fellow convicts ‘had very little to see or look at, in terms of variety, in terms of what one had become used to Seeing people come and go, different distances, different colours, different lives, all just one vague big grey soup’ What struck me most about his comments was how starkly prison-industrial complexes violate the agency of those they detain, limiting prisoners’ ability to connect with each other and the outside world, and most of all, denying any assertion of individual identity I began to wonder how writing and visual art could help represent prisoners deemed invisible by wider society Interviews, such as the one in the podcast, contribute to building a biographical narrative of a subject – but what about photographs, portraits and paintings? What might an ethical portrait of a prisoner look like? Could art be used as a tool to give agency back to those on the inside? Or rather, who do prisoners rely on to construct images of them from the outside, in the face of a system which seeks to siphon off all humanity?   *   The dehumanisation of transgender prisoners is by no means unfamiliar, but the trial, prosecution and release of Chelsea Manning has shifted the rhetoric of both media and personal representation into a different realm During her incarceration I knew of Manning as someone both famous and infamous, whose identity as a trans woman and committer of treason has been widely sensationalised A United States Army soldier, Manning was convicted under the Espionage Act and for a number of other offences in 2013 after she ‘leaked’ over 700,000 sensitive diplomatic documents to the secret sharing site Wikileaks The files contained war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomatic cables from the state department and documents on Guantanamo Bay After pleading guilty to ten of the twenty-two charges of which she was accused, Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Several years before her sentencing, she had also spent three years in detention centres such as Camp