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Interview

France: "There is a good amount of wandering around in my line of work"

What can photography tell us about prison?

Thierry Chantegret has made photography his life’s work since he was 19 years old. He attended a photography school in Toulouse before becoming assistant fashion photographer, a career that included a great deal of travelling. He then worked for a marketing agency, and then, in a laboratory, where, among other things, he created exhibition prints for photographers from the Magnum agency. For the past 20 years, he has focused on his work as an author: institutional commissions, internships, exhibitions, and in particular, workshops in schools.

In 2021, he joined the team of the Controller-General for Places of Deprivation of Liberty (CGLPL). This independent administrative authority is permitted to visit any facility where people are imprisoned: psychiatric hospitals, police custody cells, closed educational centres, detention centres, and prisons. The visits are documented in reports that describe prisoners’ living conditions in detail.

In this team, is the role of photographer a special one? Prison Insider met with Thierry Chantegret. Interview

Crumbling walls and derelict cells; the evidence speaks for itself.

Prison Insider. What does your work with the CGLPL involve?

Thierry Chantegret. My work involves providing photographic examples for the reports which are released to the public, a few months after they are completed. When we arrive at the destination for our inspection, the members of the team introduce themselves. Each member tells the facility’s staff what he or she will be doing. As for me, I explain the way I work, and tell them that all the photos are anonymous. Everyone understands this, prisoners and officers alike. That’s the rule. When I start going around the prison, I stand out quite a bit with all my camera gear. I am often asked if I work for the press, for television…

I can’t show any faces. The prisoners know that I am there to get a general overview, and that sometimes I have no choice but to blur some images. When I want to show cell overcrowding, there will obviously be people in the picture. I can’t take a photo of an empty cell if I want to show what the actual space is like. Taking a picture of an overcrowded cell with people in it truly shows how small it is, and therefore, it properly shows off the extent of the problem. I set things up and compose my photos in a way that represents reality. Similarly, when we do night visits, I can’t enter the cells, and neither can the officers. So, because of these constraints, it would be impossible to show how prisoners sleep in overcrowded cells. For example, they often sleep on a mattress on the floor, or on top of an overturned cupboard. But I can only take pictures during the day. These are rare cases of ‘documentary fiction’.

At the same time, in jails, people are locked up for about 23 hours a day. It doesn’t matter whether it is day or night. My goal is to depict what we are seeing. A picture is worth a thousand words. Some things are self-explanatory; crumbling walls and derelict cells; the evidence speaks for itself.

PI. Why did you become interested in this line of work? Do you have a personal connection to prison life?

TC. I have always been interested in prisoners’ stories. I lived next to the Rivesaltes camp, near Perpignan, for ten years. When I was a little boy, I would play in the ruins, and later, I took pictures of them while studying photography. It’s where Spanish refugees stayed during the Spanish Civil War. Gypsies were sent there before being shipped to Saliers concentration camp and then to Auschwitz. Harkis also stayed there. I did not understand how important that was when I was a child.

I lived in Argentina for the whole of 1997. I was with a French-Argentinian photographer friend, Paula Luttringer, who was imprisoned during the dictatorship. She gave birth to her first daughter while in detention, handcuffed to a table. Later on, she documented Argentina’s detention facilities, and I accompanied her. She was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship for this project, which is a very prestigious award in the United States. I visited several sites with her. We took a trip to her classroom, where she was arrested. Most of her classmates were also sent to detention facilities. It was the first time she had been back there since that day.

While in Ethiopia, I became friends with a Canadian journalist. After we met, she was taken prisoner and sent to Somalia for two years, along with an Australian photographer. Her name is Amanda Lindhout. I followed her story very closely.

When I was young, one of the first books I read over and over again was Papillon. My maternal grandfather, who was imprisoned in Poland during the Second World War, gave it to me. He managed to escape and reached France by foot. On my beside table, I keep a small book he wrote about his travels while he was escaping. I even have something he made while he was in prison.

I am practically the only one, along with the head of mission, who gets to go everywhere.

PI. On your visits with the CGLPL, do you get to see things that others don’t?

TC. Everyone takes pictures during the visits. The entire team goes into a prison with cell phones and uses them for visual record keeping. My colleagues’ photographs are also used for report illustrations. Last July, we visited the Toulouse-Seysses prison. It has hundreds of cells, and we couldn’t visit all of them.

My job goes beyond photography. I am an external monitor, and I also report on information which I send to my colleagues. For example, during a visit to an immigration removal centre (centre de rétention administrative (CRA) when I was taking photos, one of the prisoners pointed out violent acts could potentially be recorded since I was using a camera. This turned out to be true. I take part in interviews. Some of the prisoners can also tell me which cells or sites I should visit.

The missions usually last five days, from Monday to Friday.

We arrive on site in the morning and start the mission in the afternoon. We usually finish on Friday at noon, with a report of our initial findings. On the first day, we conduct the visit in the presence of the head of the facility, then we introduce ourselves to the team. Each inspector has his/her own area to inspect. Some look after the exercise facilities, others deal with solitary confinement and disciplinary units. I am practically the only one, along with the head of mission, who gets to go everywhere. I try to be methodical about it. Having a method is important. When we visited the Val-de-Reuil detention centre, it was huge. It is one of the largest in Europe. The guards say it takes months to find their way around. They cover several kilometres a day. In the beginning, I let my feelings get in the way a bit too much and I found myself hurrying to get the work done. But with experience, I can look at things differently. When I am going to photograph a place, I organise myself differently. When the mission is over and everything is done, I can just stroll around. Then, and only then, can I let myself follow my intuitions. Wandering around is part of the job. It’s when I am wandering that I also look for pictures that are more than just illustrations.

I have an eye for photography, so I always look for pictures in my surroundings. However, there are other things usually going on, such as feelings. Yet, we can’t let ourselves get lost in feelings when working on our mission. We are there to depict the things we see, the facts. I can’t photograph smells. Nor can I show the violent atmosphere without any physical injuries or scars. In Toulouse, a prisoner was stabbed in the hand. It was pretty visible that time.

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“A rat jumped out of the toilet bowl and landed on my feet…”
For Prison Insider, Thierry Chantegret commented on two photographs he took while visiting Toulouse-Seysses prison.

Discover

PI. You are taking on the role of photographer within the CGLPL team. There were two other photographers before you. Would you like to continue working in this capacity?

TC. The photography position on the CGLPL team is a unique one. I can go anywhere. No one can stop me. If I ask for a door to be opened, the door is opened.

I am often alone. I am allowed to go anywhere; it was the same for my predecessors.

It’s taken me a while to digest everything since I first joined. There are technical and legal terms… I had never set foot in a prison before!

I had a sensitive approach to the subjects I worked with, since I had already worked with people living in precarious situations. My approach is pretty similar to what is required here, in terms of the way I meet people and how I present my work.

The way I broach a subject is bound to be different than that of my predecessors. Grégoire Korganow is a great photojournalist. Jean Christophe Hanché has done a lot of work for the press, focusing on migrants, Calais, and refugee camps. He has experience in the field that I do not have. I have never worked for the press; our approaches are different, and we each have our own way of processing our pictures. Some of my colleagues have mentioned this before. They can tell it’s a different vision, a different style. We all have different types of photographic writing.

PI. You put a great deal of emphasis on identity in your work. How does that inspire you when you are photographing places without showing any faces?

TC. I carried out a project called Identités ? which took place on five different sites. It began in the Creuse with a piece on discrimination. I had met with the head of the Union départementale des affaires familiales (Udaf), who manages the Centre social Tsigane. For this project, I photographed people in a retirement home, people with disabilities, and Turkish and Mahoran young people. I wanted to take portraits of Romani gypsies, because the Creuse is home to a large community of them. The head of Udaf gave me permission to meet with them, but the condition was that I had to make them unrecognizable. He wanted them to appear in the photos the way everyone sees them: no one wants to see them; people cross the street when they see them coming. That’s how the project started. It was a challenge, but it proved beneficial in the end.

The history of Gypsies and Romas started in India. They are all descendants of people who, at one time, left India, or more precisely, Rajasthan. I had already been to India fifteen times. As part of this project, I wanted to go back there to give my work some grounding. I had to go back to the place they had left. So, I went in search for signs of identity and things that might characterise these people. The series also includes other locations, such as Romania and Turkey. In total, there are five places, but no faces can be seen. I used symbols, words, and ways of processing the pictures to convey who these people are. My work was shown at the School of Fine Arts and at the Pompidou Museum in Metz, and I presented them to a delegation from the European Council. The people I photographed were invited to attend the exhibition.

Ever since this project, I have been approaching photography in a totally different way.
The CGLPL does not want faces to be visible in the pictures. I know that I am not there to do my own work. I am not going to take portraits. Although I am allowed to photograph anything I want, it is not part of my job. I have accepted that, so it does not frustrate me. I have come up with a few tricks: off-screen, back shots and angling the camera so that posts obscure any faces.

Lighting and framing help create a certain aesthetic.

PI. You said that in India, you wanted to avoid the pitfall of taking the kinds of pictures that we see over and over again: bright colors, the typical postcard look. Do you keep an eye on this when it comes to prisons?

TC. I try to stand out with a unique look. In my fifteen trips to India, I tried to show something different. I follow the same advice that I give to photographers in the workshops I hold in India. Do not let yourself get trapped by the colors or the traditional imagery, like beggars and cows in the street. That is the traditional imagery of India. The images I try to take are fairly unique. Or at least, I think so. On my first trip to India, my photographs were closer to street photography. Now I try to take pictures that are not so iconographic, but it is impossible to let go of everything. The colors are there, and the poverty is real. It shows up no matter what you do. Playing with the framing can help deal with this.

In the series Je ne fais que passer, I photographed everything with horizontal frames because I figured that our vision is horizontal. But now, my frames are getting more and more vertical. I’ve grown. I find that this allows me to bring in a dynamic that horizontal framing can’t. My gaze is increasingly focused on details. I am getting closer to what I called documentary fiction. I’m moving away from spontaneous photography, street photography, and journalistic photography. Sometimes I will do some staging. I will build pictures around something that I stumbled upon. I will conjure up a story from it.

When it comes to prisons, the danger is making something look good, when in reality, it does not. If there’s a wreck of a cell, with paint peeling from the walls, I will photograph it. That is my task.

Yet, the lighting and the framing help create a certain aesthetic. It is possible to take aesthetic pictures of things that are not beautiful. Some inspectors once told me that my photos can be way too pretty. Several weeks ago, I visited a police custody cell. You could hardly see a thing. I was totally ready to set up my camera and take a photograph that would look like it was taken in complete daylight. I followed the advice of one of my colleagues and did not try to lighten it. That is not a natural thing for me to do: I would have preferred to show what there was to see.  But I had to show that we could not see anything. That’s what I did.

Interviewed par Clara Grisot

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