In an abandoned prison in New Mexico, I descended the stairs down and set up my large-format camera facing the gas chamber. The room, pitch dark and damp, was lit only by the ancient, flickering fluorescent bulb in the adjacent “viewing room”. I opened my shutter and walked out to explore the vast prison, the flickering light, and a sheet of film left to collaborate in the darkness. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was the exposure length. What I didn’t know then but would discover later, after some meditation and research, was that it can take 20 minutes for a person to die in the gas chamber.
Twenty Minutes of Darkness, Archival pigment print, 56”x48
