cogito ergo sum

Valerio Bispuri: Encerrados: Latin American Prisons

Italian photographer Valerio Bispuri spent ten years in South America photographing 74 different prisons. Although he has worked all over the world, Bispuri has spent the most time in South America, living in Buenos Aires for more than ten years. His astonishingly ambitious project, entitled “Encerrados,” combines photography, anthropology, and journalism to try to understand the continent through its prisons, which he feels represent the brutal and hidden reality of a country. As he says in his artist statement:

“Prisons are a reflection of society, a mirror of what is happening in a country, from small dramas to the great social and economic crises […] I chose to explore the depths of the prison context not so much to denounce a situation often at the limits of survival, but to recount what still unites and divides South American today.”