Writer and critic Hatty Nestor spent her childhood between the council estates of Essex and the desert landscapes of New Mexico. This experience of existing between two places, and her exposure to how criminalized people are portrayed in each of them, informs her first book Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice, published by Zero Books earlier this year. Initially started as an oral history project, the book is structured through a series of interviews with artists making portraits of incarcerated, wanted or missing people today, in prisons, courtrooms, zones of solitary confinement, and spaces with heightened law enforcement or other modes of surveillance. She speaks to courtroom artists known for their slapdash sketches of celebrities, painter Alicia Neal who was commissioned by the Chelsea Manning Support Network to create a portrait of Manning while in solitary confinement, forensic modellers and contemporary artist-activists, all the while questioning: "How can we represent those who are not seen?"
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