Nico Bick, P.I.

Nico Bick’s book P.I. is set in one of Holland’s most famous jails, the Over-Amstel Penitentiary Institution, known locally as the Bijlmerbajes. The book is a typological study of the prison’s internal and external architecture: common areas, individual cells, isolation units, outdoor spaces… Each type of space is photographed several times from the same perspective and the small variations from one image to the next bring out the few features of this intentionally anonymous architecture.

Bick’s approach could not be more detached: his interest seems simply to be to show these spaces, which are generally hidden from the outside world, without any sense of visual drama. Prisoners are only present in the traces they leave on the prison: how they lay out their cell, the graffiti scrawled on an outside wall or in an isolation unit. Although Bick is shedding light on a difficult, hidden subject, his intention does not seem to be to reveal the reality of prison life, but rather to remind us of how little we know of this world. The book is in an edition of 400 copies and is available on Bick’s site.

If you have an interest in this particularly difficult and complex field of prison photography, the best place to go is Pete Brook’s blog, Prison Photography.