Grégoire Korganow photographed French prisons for the General Controller of Places of Deprivation of Liberty from January 2011 to January 2014. With full access, he delivers here his vision of the prison, of our prisons.

As of January 1, 2014, France had 67,065 incarcerated inmates, spread across 191 prisons, for an accommodation capacity of just over 57,000 places. In 2013, the average length of detention was 11.5 months.
How to photograph the prison? How can we depict confinement, constraint, separation and arbitrariness in images? Beyond the bars, cramped and dark cells, endless corridors, austere exercise yards, the reality of prison is a sensation: odors, constant noise, monotony, boredom, violence... Prison
feeds fantasy . Sometimes reality is more banal than we imagine. The horror of incarceration plays out on tiny little things, transforming everyday life into a nightmare: the permanently closed cell doors, the loneliness, the fear of the walk where anything can happen, the time spent doing nothing , empty days, weeks, months.
It is this reality of confinement that Grégoire Korganow photographs, far from clichés, shocking images. He wants to capture the unspeakable, time that stops, life that shrinks, that fades away.