Nos prisons reports, through a montage of texts and images, the work carried out for three years by Maxence Rifflet with prisoners. It is punctuated with anonymous “documents” and artistic works concerning prisons, collected during this research. At the start of the project, there was a question: how to photograph in a surveillance space without doubling it, how to frame without confining it? The first response was not to be interested in confinement in general, but in particular places: photographing prisons, rather than the prison. The first five, where Maxence Rifflet led these workshops, evoke a long architectural history: from the small Cherbourg remand prison dating from 1827 to the “ultra-secure” central prison in Condé-sur-Sarthe inaugurated in 2013, including the prisons of Caen, Rouen and Val-de-Reuil whose construction spanned a century and a half. Designed after May-81, the Mauzac experimental detention center in Dordogne is made up of autonomous buildings between which you can move. Conversely, the Villepinte remand center, in the Paris region, illustrates the spatial restrictions induced by permanent overpopulation. However, prison architecture is not only the subject of this work; it is also the place where it was developed: it was a question of photographing not only prisons, but in prison, without denying the constraints that this supposes and in collaboration with the prisoners. Also, Nos prisons firstly constitutes the story of a subjective experience, although inseparable from the photographs taken together. Maxence Rifflet recounts the places and uses that he discovered, his exchanges with prisoners, relations with the administration, or even his meetings with Robert Badinter, initiator of the Mauzac prison, with Christian Demonchy who was the architect before building that of Villepinte. The title, in its simplicity, exposes a duality: our prisons, because they are an integral part of the society in which we live, because we are responsible for them; but also ours, because they seem to come from a fatal logic and impose themselves on us. By giving a unique vision of prisons in France today, this book encourages us to free ourselves from abstract representations that prevent us from even imagining their transformation. For around twenty years, Maxence Rifflet has been carrying out documentary investigations which also involve narrative and visual research. His project on cleaning workers, as part of the commission “Les Regards du Grand Paris”, will be presented at the Magasins général de Pantin and at the Musée Carnavalet between June and October 2022. He has published Une route, un chemin (Nadar Prize for best photographic book 2010) in Point du Jour.