Panoptik
For nine years, I lived on Avenue de la Jonction in Brussels, surrounded by the prisons of Forest, Saint-Gilles and Berkendael.
Every window in my apartment looked out onto a prison. Between assignments abroad, I felt the urge to see inside. Finally, the opportunity came in February 2014, when The Wall Street Journal asked me to accompany their correspondent, Frances, to Forest prison. She wanted to write an article on prison overcrowding in Europe. At the end of our visit, in the director’s office, I tried to ask a question. He cut me off, told me he knew what I was going to ask, and that he refused to let me come back. A few months later, he was eventually persuaded and allowed me to photograph in the women’s prison.
At that time, Belgium was going through a political, economic, and social crisis, and for the first time I chose to work here, at home. It was then that I began to build close relationships with the inmates and prison guards, with whom I shared the same soundscape: the bell of the yards, police sirens, but also the cries of the inmates and sometimes those of their loved ones, at night. Why travel the world to document the human condition when it was being undermined right across from my home? I quickly understood that photographing in prison means finding your place there.
Over time, I became a confidant to my neighbors behind bars.
With my film, La Peine, I am bringing to a close a six-year intimate journey into the depths of carceral life. Through the daily lives of the men and women—inmates, officers, and the warden—the documentary reveals the fractures and the hopes of a humanity striving to resist its own negation.
To finalize the project, and in the hope of finding archival material for the credits, I met Harald Deceulaer at the National Archives. For ten years, he has collected the records of Brussels’ prisons. Yet, he has no blueprints or vintage photographs of the sites. However, he has ‘this’! He points to a cardboard box behind me, stands up, opens it, and lays out documents on the table. The paper is dog-eared, sometimes torn. Before my eyes lies a stack of files from the laboratory of penitentiary anthropology. I open the first one, dating back to 1919, and discover cursive handwriting and 9×21 cm photographic strips: black-and-white portraits in profile, full-face, and three-quarter views, with and without headwear. The shock is physical.
That same day, Vincent Spronck, the former warden of Forest, shares with me the ‘traumatic stress’ he carries within him. I don’t understand. He continues: ‘Oh, I never told you?’ From the shock of that discovery, followed by that disclosure, this project was born.
Just before the final closure and the transfer of the inmates to Haren prison, I collect the confiscated objects that are kept in a room called the ‘museum’. These are artefacts imagined and created by the inmates in order, among other things, to harm the physical integrity of their fellow prisoners or of the prison staff. Sometimes also to try to escape.
Forest prison will close for good, 112 years after having ‘welcomed’ its first inmates. I seal off the window of cell 417 in wing B to turn it into a studio. The portraits taken there will be of its very last occupants. To these men and women–inmates and staff alike, walled in, all captive of a building and a system, some of whom I have known for several years–I ask the same questions and apply the same photographic protocol. I then continue this project from 2025 onward at Saint-Gilles Prison, and later at Tournai Prison.
Prison lies. It is a perverse institution that does not say what it does and does the opposite of what it proclaims – or what others proclaim on its behalf. And when this perversity is exposed, indignation rises for a time before everything returnsto “normal.”
Vincent Spronck,
Director of Saint-Gilles Prison, former Director of Forest prison
