Three years ago, Drobis was working at a photography workshop in Mexico and gained access to a demographic that she would not have had access to in the United States—a boys’ prison in Guanagato, about two hours north of Mexico City. She bought the boys point-and-shoot, throw-away cameras and encouraged them to document their lives.
“At the end of the day, they’re just boys,” she said of the eleven- to seventeen-year-olds. “They had friendships and riffs and things they care about.”
She said some of the boys were in the prison for “very, very small crimes, like stealing because they’re so poor,” and some of them were in for rape.
“I think it’s incredibly important for journalists and photographers to be able to show the world what’s happening inside a correctional institute,” she said. “These are young kids and they need the same things as anyone else.”
Drobis said that while the boys were not being mistreated “in any shape or form,” the fact remained that the boys slept eight to a small room and called their home a jail that was three bus rides from the closest city.
In one of Drobis’s photos of the youth prison boys are doing push-ups while the sun slants across them. In another, plates piled upon plates show the meal to come—hard boiled eggs plopped on beans, with yellow and blue forks as accents. In yet another, two boys with their arms around each other stare at the camera.
“The biggest impact was on the kids,” Drobis said. “They loved it and were really, really grateful and were respectful and appreciative. They thought it was amazing that someone from the United States would want to volunteer and spend two weeks with them.”
Drobis, twenty-nine, has also documented youth in Eastern Europe, Panama, Washington, D.C. and other locales. Creating pictures, as she says, validates existence.
“My goal is to make people visually aware of the issues, or that there even is an issue,” she said.
