CONTRASTOBOOKS

ENCERRADOS

Encerrados is a long voyage lasted ten years, through 74 prisons across all the Latin American countries; a journey born from the desire to tell the story of a continent through the world of prisoners. Prisons are a reflection of society, a mirror of what is happening in a country, from small dramas to the great social and economic crises. The prison is a community, a non-place where nevertheless people live each day with precise rhythms and spaces and, to “defend” themselves, the inmates are forced to attempt to reconstruct their own habits, even in conditions often at the limits of the humane, when 18 people sleep in a cell meant for 4 and the bathroom is just a hole in a corridor.

CONTRASTOBOOKS

PACO
A DRUG STORY

Paco. A drug story is Valerio Bispuri's second book. The name Paco refers to a devastating drug born in South America. Paco is the reportage the photographer worked on for 14 years at the same time as Encerrados (a journey to 74 South American prisons), Bispuri's first book published by Contrasto in 2015. The volume has an introduction by writer Marco Lodoli and a text by journalist César Gonzalés.

CONTRASTOBOOKS

PRISONERS

Prisoners is a reportage conducted in Italy's main prison facilities, bringing together three years of work and continuing the photographic journey begun in South American prisons, Encerrados.

Valerio Bispuri is the first photographer to have obtained, from the Department of Penitentiary Administration of the Ministry of Justice, the authorization to visit some of the most important penitentiaries in our country, thus building a project of documentation of these facilities and those who inhabit them: an investigation into the mental and physical state of the human being when deprived of freedom.

MIMESIS PUBLISHING

THE FORGOTTEN

Forgotten are all those the world has stopped looking at. This photo book is both an adventure and a discovery. Every single shot proposes life tested by madness, whether it is Italy or Africa the daze you will experience is always the same. Valerio Bispuri seems endowed with a power, that of capturing the moment when pain becomes plastic, visible to the point of heartbreak. This ability is combined with stubbornness. Because getting to certain shots takes time, self-denial, years, those years he has dedicated to the subject of mental illness. The sacrifice of entire years of existence behind an artistic and at the same time civil project appears today as something revolutionary. A word of advice to those who will look at this photographic book: haste is not allowed. Let each and every shot take you inside the telling human, get lost in the details, above all, let yourself be penetrated by the often mindless eyes of this tried humanity, sunk into the well of mental illness. You will come out different, you and your gaze, forever.

SILVANA PUBLISHING

INSIDE A STORY

“Basically, I believe that photography combines the possibility of remaining a child and being a strong, courageous and unconscious man, where emotions are reflected at the same time in the speed of the shot and in the slowness of being able to look beyond it, where the moment can remain on the surface and at the same time touch great depths, and where instinct works only when it moves within the enclosure of reason.”
Inside a Story is the journey of a photojournalist within his images. Valerio Bispuri takes us into the world of the last, the forgotten and tells us his photographic and human journey through the looks, the gestures of those he photographed. A world observed or rather scrutinized with patience and courage, two recurring words in his work. A countercurrent photojournalist who uses time to know and tell, who loves long stories and who manages to unite his emotions with reality. Between the eyes of those who live behind prison bars, in the world of drugs in South America, in the universe of those who are deaf and in the reality of mental illness, Bispuri's stories are always born by observing others and his own interiority: “I have always seen photography as looking through the world with the magnifying glass of our emotions. A gesture that becomes form, a space that interposes itself at the remote corners of our inner lines.”

PONTE ALLE GRAZIE PUBLISHING

TELLING STORIES WITH THE EYES

Telling a story through photography is an art that goes far beyond technical skills. It is the difference that runs between a beautiful postcard and a reportage capable of awakening powerful emotions, of outraging, exciting, moving, of educating and sharing, of telling, in fact, without words and only with the power of images. Valerio Bispuri, a master of photojournalism, here makes available to the reader all his extraordinary experience as a photographer and a teacher who has devoted great commitment to his teaching activity over the years.The construction of a narrative through images is addressed in all its facets, starting from that subtle balance that every photograph must find between a precise description of reality and an emotional dimension up to the choice of the set of shots that, dialoguing and complementing each other, are able to return with maximum effectiveness what was intended to be communicated. Filled with anecdotes and examples drawn from personal experiences and the history of photography, Telling stories with the Eyes is a book that has a great deal to teach both neophytes and experts as well as, and here is Bispuri's skill, those who have never paid special attention to photography.This is where great stories are born.