For ten years the photographer visited the prisons of South America: each prison was a way of telling the continent from inside and out, finding light where everything seemed dark, violence and vitality set against each other in a single segment that is simply the story of South America. "The thread running through this work has been the desire to discover every country in South America, both individually and as a whole. I chose to explore the depths of the prison world not so much to denounce a situation often at the limits of survival, but to recount what still unites and divides South America today. I have been in the jails of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, meeting inmates and guards, with fear and anger, with hope and mistrust. Some inmates saw me as an opportunity or simply a distraction; others with envy, others still with contempt, because they thought I was there only to sell the pictures of their life behind bars."