In this stark and powerful book, Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian explore life on Death Row in Texas and in other states, as well as the convoluted and arbitrary judicial processes that populate all Death Rows. They document the capriciousness of capital punishment and capture the day-to-day experiences of Death Row inmates in the official ""nonperiod"" between sentencing and execution. In the first section, ""Pictures,"" ninety-two photographs taken during their fieldwork for the book and documentary film Death Row illustrate life on cell block J in Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. The second section, ""Words,"" further reveals the world of Death Row prisoners and offers an unflinching commentary on the judicial system and the fates of the men they met on the Row. The third section, ""Working,"" addresses profound moral and ethical issues the authors have encountered throughout their careers documenting the Row. Included in this enhanced ebook edition is Jackson and Christian's 1979 documentary film, Death Row.

"A lucid, smart, engaging, and accessible introduction to the impact of lynching photography on the history of race and violence in America. "--Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of "Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in America, 1890-1940"
"With admirable courage, Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith examine lynching photographs that are horrifying, shameful, and elusive; with admirable sensitivity they help us delve into the meaning and legacy of these difficult images. They show us how the images change when viewed from different perspectives, they reveal how the photographs have continued to affect popular culture and political debates, and they delineate how the pictures produce a dialectic of shame and atonement."--Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, author of "Neo-Slave Narratives and Remembering Generations"
"This thoughtful and engaging book offers a highly accessible yet theoretically sophisticated discussion of a painful, complicated, and unavoidable subject. Apel and Smith, employing complementary (and sometimes overlapping) methodological approaches to reading these images, impress upon us how inextricable photography and lynching are, and how we cannot comprehend lynching without making sense of its photographic representations."--Leigh Raiford, co-editor of "The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory"
"Our newspapers have recently been filled with photographs of mutilated, tortured bodies from both war fronts and domestic arenas. How do we understand such photographs? Why do people take them? Why do we look at them? The two essays by Apel and Smith address photographs of lynching, but their analysis can be applied to a broader spectrum of images presenting ritual orspectacle killings."--Frances Pohl, author of "Framing America: A Social History of American Art"