Håkan Ludwigson

A commentary for the death-penalty debate | Enchanting aesthetics | With a table featuring the facts known about the deceased

The Texas prison system registers 450 deaths a year. Families make no claim for 100 of them. They have been buried in the Joe Byrd Cemetery near Huntsville since the mid-nineteenth century. Inmates look after the cemetery as well as fabricate the gravestones. An x means that the prisoner was executed. A 999 indicates that he died while waiting on death row. The Swedish artists Lennart Grebelius and Håkan Ludwigson set up a final monument to these unwanted. Ludwigson photographed the stone crosses in a rigorously aesthetic manner against an identical black background. An accompanying table lists who the deceased were: their name, their age, their profession, their crime, the duration of their imprisonment, and their mode of death. A macabre yet immensely powerful series.