Monitoring of Prisons and Regimes of Monitoring

The portuguese prison photo project is a research project which articulates photographic work – to be presented in thematic exhibitions of photography – of contemporary Portuguese prisons, and critical reflections on prison conditions and prison monitoring, made by specialists – to be presented at internacional conferences and inpublications accompanying these exhibitions. Proposed by Daniel Fink, the project started in Porto in 2017, at the former prison of the city, in the Cadeia da Relação, and was continued at the Aljube Resistance and Freedom Museum of Lisbon in 2019. Here it brought together, besides the two photographers, the Swiss Peter Schulthess and the Portuguese Luís Barbosa, the Director of the Aljube Resistance and Freedom Museum and researchers from different universities, Portuguese and Swiss as well as members of different prison monitoring bodies. The photographers had been authorized, by the Directorate-General for Reinsertion and Prison Services (DGRSP), to enter six prisons in northern Portugal and one in Lisbon, between 2016 and 2017. A historical dimension was added by professor Maria José Moutinho Santos, from the University of Porto, who carried out research in the national archives and selected, from several hundreds, the images, some of them particularly impressive, used to document the history of Portuguese prisons from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century.