Toward the end of January, when this heinous year was still on the starting block, the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth received a note out of the blue. “Please forgive the audacity of this letter,” its author, a fellow-Minneapolitan named Christopher Fausto Cabrera, began. The missive was indeed audacious: not just a fan letter, of the kind that a world-renowned photographer like Soth might receive, but one that also sought to strike up an epistolary exchange. Then again, Cabrera didn’t have much to lose. He was reaching out to Soth from the confines of the nearby Minnesota Correctional Facility-Rush City, where he is serving a twenty-six-year sentence for killing one person and injuring three others in a drive-by shooting. Soth wrote back to Cabrera, and, through a correspondence in the months that followed, the two developed an unusual, touching friendship, shaped by the upheavals of this year.
In their letters, which they have compiled in a new collection, “The Parameters of Our Cage,” we see the photographer, who has been a chief chronicler of American sadness and alienation since his landmark book, “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” from 2004, assume the role of intimate confidant. Starting with prompts asking Cabrera to describe, for instance, eight photographs he would take to a desert island, Soth eventually ends up offering a detailed confession of a life-altering experience of his own, and openly wrestles with his own position of privilege in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Soth, the son of a successful lawyer, grew up in a “stable home, financially and otherwise,” near Prince’s pre-Paisley Park residence. Cabrera, for his part, grew up in the suburbs with his aunt and uncle after the death of his mother, when he was twelve. He describes his upbringing as a “tale of two cities straddling the fence with one foot on the green grass of the suburbs and one foot on the cracked concrete of Minneapolis,” adding, “I had plenty of opportunities to follow some good paths, and I almost did.” In his writings, despite the seemingly dire conditions in prison (at one point, he describes the brutal toll a stint of kitchen duty has taken on his body), he is sensitive, thoughtful, erudite. Incarcerated at twenty-two, Cabrera, now forty years old, is poignantly aware of the “insurmountable debt” that he owes the world because of his actions, and vows to pay it forward. (“Getting out isn’t the end of my prison sentence; it’s the beginning of my true redemption. My supposed debt to society in a cage doesn’t account for my debt to humanity,” he writes.) But he has also managed to tap into a well of deep compassion, both for his former self and, remarkably, for others who also might seem undeserving, including Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed Floyd.
It’s clear that some of this hard-won tenderness has come from the time that Cabrera has spent reading during his incarceration, and the authors he quotes in his letters—Rainer Maria Rilke, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson—betray a romantic bent that textures his messages to Soth. His prose can turn lyrical at times, as in the passage that gives rise to the book’s title, which he wrote in response to the news of coronavirus lockdowns. “We all confront the parameters of our cage eventually,” he writes. “What we do when we reach those bars helps define us.” But Cabrera is not wholly filled with penitence and contemplation; he makes space for righteous anger as well. Often, this is directed at the penal system itself, which he sees as wholly inadequate to provide either justice or its stated goal of prisoner “correction.” “I’ve been in here for 17 years,” he writes, “and have had to fight to define redemption for myself. I know that none of this is justice. This system creates more problems and solves nothing.”
At the heart of Soth and Cabrera’s connection is art: art as a container of meaning, a honing steel for the sensibilities, a lodestar for living. Both Cabrera and Soth write movingly about its singular importance in their lives, and Cabrera, in particular, relishes every opportunity to dig deep, even in response to Soth’s exercises. In the excerpt below, he writes about a pair of photos that Soth has sent him, with a prompt: “Think of the photograph as a diving board and then jump into a pool of thoughts.”
