Grace Before Dying began as an assignment for Imagine Louisiana magazine, whose editor commissioned me to document the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s hospice program. Once I finished my assignment in June of 2007, I received permission from the prison’s warden to continue to photograph the program. A life sentence means life at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Because Louisiana has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country, more than 85 percent of the 5,100 prisoners at Angola are expected to die there. Until the hospice program was created in 1998, prisoners died mostly alone and unattended in the prison hospital. Their bodies were buried in shoddy boxes in numbered graves at the prison cemetery. But a nationally recognized hospice program, run by prisoner volunteers, has changed that. Now when a terminally ill inmate is too sick to live in the general prison population, he is transferred to the hospice ward where a team of six volunteers works shifts to look after him. The volunteers, most of whom are serving life sentences themselves, try to keep him as comfortable as possible. Then, in the last days of dying, the hospice staff begins a 24-hour vigil. The volunteers go to great lengths to ensure that their fellow inmate does not die alone. Hospice volunteers plan a memorial service and burial. The casket, made by prisoners, is taken from the prison to the cemetery in a beautifully handcrafted hearse, also made by prisoners. The hearse is drawn by two giant Percherons and followed by a procession friends and sometimes family members who sing and walk behind the hearse. Dying alone in prison is no longer one of the deepest fears of inmates at Angola. The hospice volunteers’ commitment to create a tone of reverence for the dead and dying has touched the entire prison population. Prison officials say that the program has helped to transform one of the most violent prisons in the South into one of the most peaceful maximum-security institutions in the United States. Grace Before Dying is inspired by the volunteers and the patients as they go through the days of death together. The volunteers have to go through a difficult process to find the love within themselves in order to do this work. They have discovered the possibilities of humanity and courage within an environment designed to isolate and punish. I believe the men involved with this program have as much wisdom to share with the penal system as they do with free society. While I have been shooting this project using a variety of camera formats. The dimensions of the wide frame seem to speak to the emotional and the environmental realities that the volunteers and patients exist in. Angola Prison is a massive campus occupying flat delta land equal to the size of Manhattan. More than what we can see though, the panoramic view feels appropriate as I try to communicate the emotional landscape that the prisoners abide. Their day-to-day schedule is dominated by the underlying timeline of their prison sentence. Underneath their patience and devotion to the patients in the program, I sense the emotional undertow of the reality that they will one day themselves be patients in the hospice program that they have helped create. In telling this story, I have been very moved by the beautiful way the panoramic camera can both connect to the intensity of the moment, while providing a respectful space for that moment to be recorded. There is a democracy to the elements in the frame and I have found a profundity in this format’s simplicity and space.