Prison pictures

Recently, my good friend Johan Doumont invited me to join him on a photo tour at the abandoned prison at Hasselt city. It is a strange location, in a sense really out of this world. One pities the people who had to spend part of their lives in this sterile cocoon. Perhaps the guards and other personnel are to be pitied most, as, for some bizarre twist of mind, they voluntarily decided to bury themselves in a receptacle of negative, destructive energy.

It was hard to get to the heart of the matter, photographically speaking, in just a couple of hours. I wish I could have spent at least a full day there. I left with only very few negatives exposed. But I was happy to see that there were quite a few good ones amongst them. The one shown above appealed very strongly to me. It very much exemplifies the style I'd like to develop further. It was taken with a Hasselblad ELX, fitted with a Distagon 60mm lens, on Ilford Delta 100 film.

A couple of negatives showed very strange ghosting images, probably due to a second-hand Hasselblad film back I had never used before. It is barely visible in the picture shown here. In others it is very obvious. Rather than trying to correct it, I decided to leave it as it is as it reinforces the eery atmosphere of this place.