In April 2015, as the last prisoners were transferred, Mathieu Pernot visited several times the historical La Santé jail in Paris. He photographed the entire building and went through all the empty cells to make an inventory of the graffitis and images still hanging on the walls. These traces convey a sense of the authors’ presence and reveal their unique space of free expression. Mathieu Pernot documented them with his distinctive sober and rigorous style, before their disappearance.

In Fall 2015, as the demolition started, Mathieu Pernot photographed the different stages of the destruction of this 19^th-century building. This series is presented in the second part of the book.