Inside Outside

Missing images, missing words: Who is to speak for the prison?¶

To speak about prisons accurately is to give a voice to those who live it.

Each month, the photographer, Bertrand Gaudillère creates an image or chooses one from his archives. Prison Insider sends it to a dozen participants, prisoners around the world.The photographies open a dialogue: a testimony, a symbolic transfer with the outside world, an invitation to read what is experienced and what is thought inside.

InsideOutside sprang from the particular belief that prisoners, regardless of their place of incarceration, the length of their sentence, their gender, their age, and their material conditions of detention, share the same experience: the impairment of their senses by the prolonged deprivation of liberty.

We asked several prisoners, separated by countries, walls, and cultures, to react to Bertrand Gaudillère’s images. They talk about their perceptions of Touch, Sight, Taste, Smell, Hearing, and, for good measure, Time and Space.

The responses they gave us are in the form of free text. Here they are.

This project is jointly led by Bertrand Gaudillère, du collectif item, and Prison Insider.

In collaboration with AJEM (Lebanon), Antigone (Italy), Le Mas (France), OIP-Argentina, Prisoners Abroad (Great-Britain), Ukraine without torture (Ukraine).

— Translated by Morgan Carmody¶