Belem Prison.

My friend Sebastian Mayer, a photographer and artist, is currently living in Rio De Janeiro. He just uploaded a very impressive photo-set on flickr about his trip to the Belem Prison where he was supposed to take some pictures for a social organization in Brazil that is working to help improving the situation in prisons. He himself says about this trip:

‘I normally am not working as a journalist or reporter and it was an incident that I got this opportunity. After years of taking shots of more-or-less famous people (or just wannabes) I thought I could have a look onto the other side, so I agreed. I was not prepared to see things like I have seen. It was the other side of the medal, the abyss of the superficial, stylish world that I’ve had in europe.’

This is just raw material that he took with a ‘crappy digital camera’ but it is definitely worth a look. He also worked with a middleformat camera, but this stuff isn’t digitilized yet.