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Artist’s Statement
The twenty-seven inmates I photographed act as a metaphor for our criminal justice system.
The Final Exposure project actually started for me at about age 15 when I argued the issues of the death penalty with my father. Six years of my life have been devoted to documenting the unseen, unheard stories of an American subculture – people on death row. I wanted to see if art could make a difference. I realized before I began that we don’t have to travel half way around the world to find some unique phenomenon or recently discovered civilization to pique our jaded curiosity. The problem of our government-sanctioned murder lives with us.
My crew and I endured bone-chilling snowstorms, cheap motels, greasy meals and having our bodies frisked in order to bring this story to light. We fraternized with some of the best legal minds in the country, and with as many of the most depraved. We explored the darkest side of the human condition even though it was our objective to humanize the people that the federal government and the states execute. We made sure we understood who was being killed in order to start a real debate about capital punishment. Many of the men/women are stoic when marching to their demise. But even though we admire the stamina that it takes to endure this ordeal in the super-macho environment, these are not heroic voyages these men are taking. And we must never be seduced into thinking otherwise.
Lou Jones
Lou Jones has maintained a commercial photography studio in Boston for many years. Much of the work is for advertising agencies, design studios & directly for Fortune 500 corporations. A large portion of the commissioned work is for publications & magazines, such as Time/Life, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic & Paris Match in 63 foreign countries & 48 or the fty USA states. Jones has covered thirteen Winter & Summer Olympic Games.
Lou Jones has served on the boards of directors for Photographic Resource Center & the American Society of Media Photographers. He has taught photography at several colleges & universities & continues to lecture about photojournalism & ne art photography.
When not traveling Jones exhibits at schools, museums & galleries around the world: Smithsonian Institution, deCordova Museum, Grin Museum of Photography, Cape Cod Museum of Art, Texas Tech University, Harvard University as well as libraries & institutions.
For his entire career, Jones has undertaken many personal long term projects, such as, Japan, tall ships, jazz, pregnancy & six years photographing men/women on fourteen death rows in the USA which resulted in two books & many exhibitions.
For the past few years, Lou Jones has been documenting all 54 countries in contemporary Africa country by country. We are trying to change the narrative from the stereotypical negative topics of poverty. pestilence & conict. http://www.panAFRICAproject.org We just returned from number sixteen & ve weeks in Mozambique. This series is a sampling of the work we have done to date.
