In September 2002, I spent a day, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., documenting 51 inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary as they picked row after row of cotton in the fields surrounding the maximum-security prison known as ‘The Farm’ in Angola, Louisiana. Their job was to harvest scraps that a cotton harvester left behind on 10-plus acres of land. Using a couple of Leica cameras and a pocketful of color film, some of it chrome and, unfortunately, some of it color negative, I came away with images of inmates picking cotton at Angola that, aside from the walkie-talkies and pickup trucks, look like they could have been made 100 years ago.
