Images of immigration detention.

'THREE MEN AND THREE WOMEN came to our house at 5.30 am. My wife started to cry. They took first my wife and my son, and then me and the two children.... We were all crying.'

These words of a distraught father are quoted in a new photographic exhibition which features not Chile, South Africa or the Soviet Union in the Seventies but, shockingly, the treatment of asylum seekers in Britain today.

On any one day some 2,000 people are held in immigration detention in the UK. A large proportion are asylum seekers, who have fled from oppression overseas. Some have been refused asylum and are waiting to be sent home; others are still going through the process.

Many, like the family quoted, have been picked up in the early hours of the morning with no opportunity to prepare.

Imprisoned, which was first seen at the Spitz Gallery in London in January, was created by Isabelle Merminod, a French photographer who for eight years ran a group of visitors to detained asylum seekers held in centres near Heathrow Airport. A special needs teacher by training, she is particularly passionate about the detention of children, 2,000 of whom are estimated to be locked up by the immigration authorities every year.

Photography is not allowed inside detention centres, so Merminod uses pictures of former detainees to tell her story. They are accompanied by quotations from detainees and from reports by human rights groups.

Although the regime in Britain's detention centres is different from that in prisons, the experience is still one of imprisonment. Detainees cannot leave the detention centre and they live behind locked gates and walls topped with barbed wire. Unlike convicted criminals, they can be held indefinitely.

'You do not have a voice when you are detained,' says one of those interviewed by Merminod. 'You become someone who has nothing, who is nothing.'

Another describes being told by an immigration officer: 'I do not have the right to talk to you, because you have nothing to say.... Speak to your solicitor. Tell him to write to me. I speak with written words.'

For people who have suffered in their home countries and live in terror of being returned, the experience can be devastating and dehumanising. Twelve people have committed suicide in immigration detention since January 2000: one of them the day after the exhibition opened.

The exhibition, sponsored by six charities and NGOs, is available for display in other venues.