Prisoners by Valerio Bispuri is a reportage conducted in the main Italian prison facilities, which collects three years of work. He is the first photographer to have obtained, from the Italian Department of Penitentiary Administration of the Ministry of Justice, the authorization to visit some of the most important penitentiaries in Italy. In Prisoners the photographer documents these buildings and of persons who live in them: it is an investigation into the mental and physical state of the human being when deprived of freedom.

Valerio Bispuri accessed 10 Italian prisons - more or less large and with different levels of security - from 2014 to 2019. From the Ucciardone Prison in Palermo, to Poggioreale in Naples; from the Roman prisons of Regina Coeli and Rebibbia Femminile, to the new Capanne Prison in Perugia; passing through Milan (Bollate Prison and San Vittore Prison) and Venice (Giudecca Prison), up to the Penal Colony of Isili (Cagliari) and the small Prison of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi in the province of Avellino.
The images of Prisoners bear witness to the main problems: overcrowding, the precariousness of the buildings, the lack of staff, the difficulty in setting up programs for the re-education of the prisoner, sanctioned by the Constitution, often abandoned to inactivity.
The intense black and white of Bispuri’s photographs tells of the personal dramas and collective traumas of men and women who are a mirror of the entire society, locked in narrow and dilapidated spaces, often busy creating new affections and new habits, in a non-place frozen in time and hidden on the edges of the world.

The booklet accompanying the book contains texts by the photographer himself, of Edoardo Albinati, who has worked as a teacher in the Rebibbia penitentiary for over twenty years, and of the professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Law Stefano Anastasia, Founder and honorary president of the Antigone association and Guarantor of persons deprived of liberty for the Lazio and Umbria regions.

“I have had the opportunity to get to know the world of Italian prisons from the inside and the idea I have gained is of boundless solitude: the inmates are permanently in contact with each other, yet they are always alone, at any time of the day.” - Valerio Bispuri