I was seven years old when something mysterious prompted me to spend the pocket money of 5000 Lire that my father gave me for a school trip, to buy my first camera. It's been a while since then but I still have the desire, the requirement, the need to explore the world through pictures. The photography as a survey, as an opportunity to deepen and reveal stories, situations that are unknowhed,or who for some reason are hidden.vThis is also why I've always loved long reports to get to the bottom and dig.

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Encerrados is a project, a 10-year history that has led me on a long journey to the prisons of all South American countries, 74 prisons, from Columbia and Venezuela up to Argentina and Chile, countries of a continent in many ways still unknown. I chose to speek about South America through the prisons because they are a reflection of a culture in the good and bad and they represent the difficulties and hopes of a people.

Encerados is a long thread that runs through the cities, smiles, anger, illusions of those who live locked up. An investigation work to get to know the prison world, but also the continent South America, a work of complaint to show the often inhumane and terrible conditions faced by prisons, an anthropological work that tries to see the man locked up and never make a judgment but simply telling.

Encerrados started in 2002 and ended in the 2011. It has been shown at the Visa pour l'image of Perpignan, the most important festival of photojournalism of the world, in berlin, at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, in Buenos Aires and in Geneve. It won many famous prizes, the sony award in the category contemporary issues, the Poy Latin America (special mention) the second prize of the Poy Story Editing Magazine. It has been published almost everywhere in italy and abroad. Now is the time to do a book, a document that remains, and it is the only way to present the complete work with 100 photographs that tell a continent and give the opportunity through photography to know the encerrados, the enclosed.

Sony: http://www.daringtodo.com/lang/it/2013/04/26/sony-world-photography-awards-2013-tre-italiani-tra-i-vincitori/

http://www.businesspeople.it/Foto-del-giorno/Aprile-2013/Vincitori-Sony-World-Photography-Awards-2013/Encerrados-Valerio-Bispuri

Poy 2014: http://www.poy.org/71/27/second_01.php

ENCERRADOS

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