Operation Jurassic is an eight-year-long collaborative personal project between sister and brother photographers Roxana and Pablo Allison that portrays their emotional journey leading up to, during, and after Pablo’s imprisonment in the United Kingdom. Their visual account uncovers feelings and the passing of time through legal documentation, paperwork, letters, diaries, drawings, and photographs, offering the viewer an intimate approach of the legal process whilst quietly raising issues of freedom of expression, graffiti, and the criminal justice system.

Pablo was arrested in his own home in March 2010 on suspicion of having committed ‘criminal damage by means of graffiti to trains, railways infrastructures and other buildings’ between January 2003 and October 2009. His apprehension was part of one of the largest and possibly most costly anti-graffiti police investigations in the UK, which was conducted in London and was officially called Operation Jurassic. This was not an isolated case, as police investigations against graffiti and street artists whose work is illegal are carried out regularly in Britain.

In November 2012, along with four other graffiti artists, Pablo was sentenced to nineteen months’ imprisonment serving five and a half months at two different facilities in London: Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton Prison. The rest of his sentence was completed on house arrest with a monitoring device attached to his ankle.

Roxana and Pablo’s project – named after the police investigation – emerged from their need to detach from the situation they were faced with, but as time passed, it proved to bind them closer together leading up to a tight-knit photographic collaboration with its own challenges, allowing them to retrace and understand their relationship.

The collaboration resulted in a self-published book, which was part-funded with a small grant from the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (NCJAA) bursary and with financial aid from the Digital Women’s Archive North (DWAN). The book was launched at the Impressions Gallery Photo Book Fair in Bradford in October 2018, with an ‘In Conversation’ with Pippa Oldfield, Head of Programme at Impressions Gallery.

The London-based Pavement Studio designed and co-published the book, which features an introduction by writer, curator, and educator Pete Brook, whose main subject of interest is photography and the criminal justice system. The first edition sold out within three weeks of launching; a second edition has been released in the winter of 2020.

An extract from Pete Brook’s introductory essay:

‘This book is a thread. A warm thread spun by two siblings during one’s incarceration. These images, conceived during months of separation and crafted during more months of house arrest, emerge from the worry and dislocation imprisonment brings. Born of necessity, these images are what Pablo and Roxana Allison did, dreamt up and fabricated; emotional twine that kept them sane and connected both.’

To view a more extensive version of this photo essay, visit: roxanaallison.co.uk/operation-jurassic

All photographs ©Roxana & Pablo Allison