Panoptik

PANOPTIK opens doors that are rarely even ajar: those of three prisons in Brussels. For over ten years, Cédric Gerbehaye shared the daily lives of inmates and prison staff. Building on the documentary film he directed (La Peine), this book—structured as an investigation and a journal —brings his images into dialogue with a collection of exceptional photographic archives— anthropometric portraits dating back to the 1910s and previously unpublished documents from the prison administration— to tell a history of incarceration spanning over a century. At the crossroads of documentary, history and art, this book reveals the need for a profound transformation of the prison landscape, in Belgium as elsewhere in Europe. Enlightened by texts from two historians and a prison director, PANOPTIK invites us to rethink our relationship with punishment and the very idea of humanism that we wish to uphold.