Baumettes, Marseille. February 2020. Building B. © Marco Barbon

Les Baumettes 

Marco Barbon

2019 – 2020 – Marseille, France

About this series

The four buildings of the Baumettes prison in Marseille were built over period of many decades starting in the 1930s and definitively abandoned in June 2018. They will soon be destroyed to make way for new buildings, whose construction is due to begin in 2022.
This work – which includes 45 colour photographs taken between November 2019 and February 2020 with a medium format camera – documents, before they disappear, the places and traces of inmates and prison staff.

Baumettes, Marseille. February 2020 South-east control tower. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes, Marseille. December 2019. A cell in building B, North aisle (hospital quarter). © Marco Barbon
Baumettes, Marseille. December 2019. Individual walking courtyard. Building D, 6th floor. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes , Marseille. February 2020. Building B. Prison cell. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes, Marseille. February 2020. Building D. Sports hall, ground floor. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes. Cell in building D. February 2020. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes, Marseille. February 2020. South courtyard,Building C. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes, Marseille. February 2020. Building D, first floor.. Surveillance post. © Marco Barbon
Baumettes, Marseille. December 2019. Building B. Cell. © Marco Barbon

Photographer: Marco Barbon
Nationality: Italian
Based in: France
Website: www.marcobarbon.com

Born in Rome in 1972, Marco Barbon lives and works in France since 2001.
Since 2005 he has been engaged in a personal artistic research, from which emerge his two favorite issues : on the one hand the temporality of the image, on the other the border zone between reality and dream, document and fiction. Author of the books Asmara Dream (Filigranes, 2009; republished in 2016), Cronotopie (Trans Photographic Press, 2010), Casablanca (Filigranes, 2011), Les pas perdus (Poursuite, 2014), Asmara (Be-Pôles, 2014), El Bahr (Filigranes, 2016) and The Interzone (CLF, 2017), his works are regularly exhibited in France and abroad and belong to several public and private collections.