Jürgen Chill's photographic series zellen is the closest you'll ever have to come to being inside a German prison cell. As if suspended from the ceiling above these tiny spaces, Jürgen's bird's eye perspective is applied to 9 different in-use cells across several German prison's.
He said in an interview "My photographs are most like a map of the prison cells; like a Google Earth view of a landscape. I try to communicate information about the individuals that have to live in perhaps the smallest possible space for habitation that a person can have - without showing this person himself. Personal and functional items are all accommodated in the tightest space.
I’m interested in how a person arranges personal and functional items in their small cell. And what kind of person can it be [based upon the visible evidence]? Is it possible to get a “picture” of a person by having a view of his private space? It’s a view and perspective that you normally would never get of these cells. So it is not really “real”, more a scenery set or something similar."
Source: juergenchill
6 comments:
If you didn't tell me these were prison cells I would have guessed that these were dorm rooms.
And people say American prisons are soft. :)
What's the big deal? Some of these are bigger than the dorm room I lived in for 3 years.
These look nicer than the shit hole I live in now...where do I sign up?
How has he defined 'prisons'? some do infact look like dorm rooms, and the last one in red is a S+M room, just look at the walls? leather straps etc? surely in this sense there is a broader use of the word?
The German prison system believes, first and foremost, in preparing its citizens to lead productive, law-abiding lives after their incarceration. As a result, recidivism rates and the overall percentage of German citizens that is incarcerated is much lower in Germany than in the U.S. This puts a much lower strain on society than the current punitive American penal system-- and anyone who says that American prisons are soft has clearly never been incarcerated for very long. Ultimately, we lose our humanity as individuals and as a nation when we torture our fellow humans, regardless of what they have done to "deserve" it.
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