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Saint-Paul and Saint-Joseph are prisons in Lyon built in the 19th century by Louis Baltard and Antonin Louvier. Due to their age and lack of capacity, both were decommissioned in 2009 after the last prisoners were transferred to a new penitentiary.
A project led by Sofade, the Université Catholique de Lyon and Habitat et Humanisme aims to transform the buildings into offices, community housing and a university campus (with 5 000 students), planned to open in 2015.Bruno Paccard and Ernest Pignon-Ernest
The photographer Bruno Paccard lives and works in Lyon. These prisons were part of his environment for many years, and the Municipal Archives commissioned him to do a photographic documentary on them when they closed.
As a visual artist and an early protagonist of urban art, Ernest Pignon-Ernest commemorated the former inmates with inscriptions on the walls which once emprisoned them, and within which he dispensed painting lessons twenty years before. Both born in the same area of Nice, but four years apart, Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Bruno Paccard spent their childhood and adolescence there without ever meeting. They finally met in Lyon when they were both working on projects in the now-empty prisons of Saint-Paul and Saint-Joseph. That meeting led to friendship and an exchange of photographic images.
Michel Onfray
Who better than this philosopher, focused on the autonomy of thought and of life, to present the work of Bruno Paccard and Ernest Pignon-Ernest?
Without any judgment on the reasons why people have been imprisoned for nearly two hundred years, there is something in the very act of detention that goes against nature, going beyond any specific case, begging to be summarized in a single image, at once unique and multiple, singular and universal. Ernest Pignon-ErnestHow can you not hear the echoes of the cries, shouts, lamentations and complaints when you read those graffiti on the dank prison walls? How can you not feel the rage behind words such as: “In here, the rats shake your hand, and they eat better than we do. Suffer, but don’t forget.”?
Another quotation that I think about often and needs no further explanation : “Prison is hard, freedom is for sure, life isn’t easy ! ». Bruno PaccardAny prison is barbarous because it puts men in cages to make them pay with a punishment that is just a repetition of the original offense, all that for having been savages at some stage, a fatal day, a fatal hour, a fatal second (maybe not even that….).
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Prison is full of scapegoats that avoid having to imprison the real culprits….those who make animals of those who they accuse of having one day behaved like animals themselves…. Michel Onfray