Inside the Architecture of Authority

Above: Death Chamber: Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary (largest prison in the United States), 2005.
"Ninety percent of inmates who enter Angola [Louisiana State Penitentiary], never leave," says photographer Richard Ross. Inmates work on the prison farm and are not allowed to eat the cows they raise because the quality of the meat is too high. Meals at Angola can cost as little as 17 cents per person since so much of the food is grown on site.



Above: An indoor exercise yard at Pelican Bay State Prison, California.
Pelican Bay prison holds some of the most dangerous inmates in California. Inmates are often accompanied by four guards during transport within the facility. The light coming through the ceiling in this photo is likely the only sunlight that inmates see during their sentence. In spite of the immense security, Ross says, prisoners are still able to get messages to the outside world to carry out deals and assassinations.

A new book by photographer Richard Ross, Architecture of Authority, examines the way institutional buildings exert power over people. Ross managed to gain impressive access to all kinds of secretive or high-security buildings, from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, to the supermax high-security Pelican Bay prison in California. Ross credits his unprecedented access to a combination of persistence and sincere curiosity. "Many of these people want to show you these places once they know that you're interested in their world," he says.

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