Intimate Prisons


  • Photographer
    Rodrigo Albert
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2004/2009

The project was developed in the prisons Apac (Association of Protection and Assistance for the Convicts) in Brazil. In Apac, there is no presence of police; the prisoners are the responsible for the prison.

Story

How can one discuss the issue considering beyond the social security context also the particular concerns of the subjects involved? How can one register voices and gestures, silences and gaze? After all, what lives, what bodies, what dreams and thoughts are weaved there, where our eyes can’t reach? It was necessary to go through the invisible wall dividing some men to others?

Frequent visits had to happened before I realized that those images were a personal attempt to prove that some wishes and dreams are common to every man and to be more aware of how important freedom is in human life. The sentence “any man can be guilty” coming out in the speech of one of the first convicts, I had the opportunity to talk was the door that opened a new perspective of the dehumanized world of the jail to me. Through the project New Directions on Penal Execution, I was asked to carry out a photographic essay to document the Apac (Association of Protection and Assistance for Convict) system. The Apac is a special prison model in which the convicts themselves are charged of the security and all other community duties inside the prison. My experience inside the Apac since 2002, amongst visits and chats with convicts, resulted in a long visual project, documenting a prison that privileges conviviality and social re-insertion but it is also a portrait of the everyday life of some men marked by a rough past of marginality and stories of violence. Ideas around crime and punishment inhabited me and I watched and was watched at the same time, being me the criminal as well as the eye keeper. In 2009 I got permission to sleep for six nights in a cell with 33 prisoners.

APAC this method was designed and implemented by lawyer Mário Ottoboni in 1972 in São Paulo, Brazil. Since 1986, Apac is affiliated to prison Fellowship International, the UN advisory body for matters prison. In 1991 was published in the U.S. a report stating that the Apac method could be applied to anywhere in the world.

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