Out of Print, Limited Copies are Available. Published by University of Mississippi Press, 1997. Photographs by Ken Light. Text by Suzane Donovan.

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 accompanying essay, "Shadow Figures: A Portrait of Life on the Row," 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. Since 1976, when the U. S. Supreme Court upheld this country's death penalty laws, the population on death row has grown steadily. In 1994, more than 3,000 convicts awaited execution nationwide, most were male, and over 400 were incarcerated on death row in the state of Texas. With ninety percent approval, no other place in America has sanctioned 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 closed and troubling world.

Hardcover: 128 pages