Texas Death Row

Ken Light and his camera were permitted unparalleled access to Texas death row. His stark, powerful images show where and how the condemned live. In the year he took these pictures, fourteen men were executed in Texas. Suzanne Donovan's essay draws upon her interviews with the condemned men and with prison authorities, family members, and members of victims' families. Whoever opens this book will want to look away, for the pictures and words force us to gaze intimately into the eye of death. Light's photographs make us ask what we have done in sanctioning execution. With ninety percent approval, no other place in America has approved the death sentence so overwhelmingly as Texas. Ken Light's raw, austere photographs and the accompanying text reveal what we have created in the hopeless world of court-ordered death. Who are the men who exist there? What do they look like? How do they survive, and what are the rhythms of their daily lives? While outsiders focus on the final act of execution, the real drama unfolds each day in this arcane world.