Prisons

by Stéphane Brasca
Editorial director of the magazine de l’air
 
 
“For three years now, Grégoire Korganow has basically been missing in action. If you call him, you hear, “I’m in prison.” Few photographers are able to devote this much time to a single subject, especially in a space with four tight walls, double locked. However Korganow does have a certain freedom in these spaces, making his work even more unique. Thanks to his position as “Inspector of spaces where freedom is non-existent,” he was able to do something no other photographer has been able to do, since other photographers were subject to arbitrary decisions by the Penitentiary Administration, were followed closely by a guard, were not allowed to go into certain areas, were not allowed to speak to certain persons, and were rushed into trying to take the perfect shot. Korganow was subjected only to pressures he established for himself. Meaning -- as seen in the images he shot -- not taking advantage of the absence of restrictions to choose the spectacular, demagogy, sentimentality. Throughout his time there, in spite of his fear, incipient rebellion, even an increasing lassitude, he kept his distance in order to create a unique documentation of his work, a piece on the state of French prisons today, something no one has ever done. His photographic report is implacable. We can finally see that which we have read about or heard about in these French prisons. He has attached images to words, to witness statements, denunciations which crop up repeatedly in books, reports, fictional feature films, other articles. Somehow these denunciations do not move us as much now given the fact that politicians on all sides would not risk voting for ways to fundamentally improve detainees’ conditions in France. This is where this work is so important. It shows the dead end street in which law and justice have blocked themselves. A man running in a walled-off courtyard is nowhere in terms of the law. Prisoners up to their ankles in water, with garbage and rats everywhere -- no one cares. A prisoner with cuts on his wrists, suicidal, drugged to the eyeballs -- should not be in a cell. Three or four young men share a lice-filled space 4 meters square, with no privacy whatsoever, and are excluded from society and its rules. Newly built prisons, high security (for the guards at least), with cameras everywhere, with spots of bright colors on the walls, accentuating further the inhuman nature of their detention. Korganow’s images, and others, are always frontal, unedited and not Photoshopped, without aesthetic intention, yet they are beautiful images, pushing us, shaking us up because they are so well thought out, so rich, constructed. There is nothing gratuitous, no illusion, channeling pure photojournalism, based on what is real. If you look closer, you see how omnipresent the body is in this work, evoking violence, boredom, desperation, injustice, solitude, filth, overcrowding ... the bodies are mutilated, tattooed, overly muscular, exhausted. Grégoire Korganow reminds us that this body is the last one, the only thing the detainee possesses now. This attention to the body is a constant for this photographer who seems to caress it with his camera, who shows how much he belongs to the wide community of human beings, in particular the slightly ‘off,’ the rejects, the flayed, the hidden away ... Happy, triumphant people do not interest Korganow much. His work on the prisons was not at all a parenthesis in his professional life, a moment where he decided he would confront the misery of the world; his entire career has been affected by the idea of exclusion. It’s a journey which brought him from the Parisian suburbs to the rebellions of the Mapuche Indians, the severely wounded of the Iraq war to French alcoholics...  I have known him or more than twenty years and I know he feels no pleasure or relief when meeting people who are more unhappy than he is. The justification for his intentions is about desire, and -- let’s use the big words -- citizenship, altruism, denouncing injustice and refusing indifference. A prison is an exact synthesis of society’s ills. It does not imprison only bad men and a few bad women, it is where inequity, insanity, social determinism, ignorance, the absence of free will, the abuse of power, and the law of the strongest prevail ... We measure the civilization of a society by its ability to judge the weakest and most dangerous of us ... a photograph of our current society presented to us by Grégoire Korganow.”

Stéphane Brasca
About the exhibition Prisons at the MEP in 2015