Italian photographer Valerio Bispuri spent ten years in South America photographing 74 different prisons. His impressively ambitious project, entitled "Encerrados", combines photography, anthropology, and journalism to try to understand the continent through its prisons, which he feels represent the brutal and hidden reality of a country.

Bispuri decided to go to the horrifying prisons to get a better insight into the men and women who are locked away and have to cope with non existent standards of living, daily threats on their life and extreme abuse of power.

As a result, his candid black and white photography has a sensitivity to it and is made all the more poignant by the fact that his work has raised awareness for those living in these derelict institutions... kicking off a debate about prisons, human violence and paradoxically about the solidarity between (some) prisoners created to survive.