Photographer B.A. Van Sise spent two years visiting 37 prisons across 17 states, sitting down with roughly 200 incarcerated men, women and children — and refusing to ask any of them what they did. The project, Land of the Free, secured access he says no photographer before him has obtained, with permission that climbed from wardens to departments of correction and, often, governors themselves.

The timing lands hard. Tennessee botched an execution this week; Texas is planning to televise another. The United States holds nearly two million people behind bars — more than any other nation, and per capita behind only Turkmenistan, Rwanda, Cuba and El Salvador. More prisoners than soldiers. More than police officers, doctors or sanitation workers.

How does anyone get into 37 prisons?

They don't, normally. Prison access is famously the hardest thing in the world to cover, and most imagemakers settle for substitutes — the newly released, the long-released, people who once walked past a prison wall. Van Sise calls those concessions "cheap," a way for officials to dodge scrutiny while feeding the public's appetite for punishment imagery.

His route in was simpler and stranger. After the first few facilities, wardens and prison directors began referring him to one another — sometimes at his request, sometimes on their own. Officials, he writes, were often shocked that he didn't want to photograph their weathered facilities or make degrading images of the people in their custody. That reputation opened doors.

The craft constraints were absolute: no lights, no tripod. His backdrop was a white sheet, because that was all he was permitted to bring. Portraits are lit by weather, an occasional scrim, or the buzzing fluorescents of the rooms he was locked into. The neutrality, he argues, is the point — sitters stripped of the grit, the mud, the hecklers, the uniforms.

And the sniper in the tower.

What did he refuse to learn?

Everything viewers will want to know first. Van Sise deliberately entered each interview ignorant of names, origins, ethnicities, convictions and sentences. He never asked the one question everyone asks. "We have a habit of reducing people to their single acts — and yes, some of those single acts are terrible — rather than on their whole," he writes.

Instead, his closing question — delivered Columbo-style, on his way out the door — was: What is your earliest memory? Some answers were transcendental. Some were "really dumb." Same as most of us, he suspects.

A few sitters professed innocence. At least two, according to their own wardens, probably are innocent. That claim sits in the piece without follow-up, and it should.

He doesn't ask viewers to like his subjects either. Some were "horrible people I adored." Some were "benign but unlikable." Many were serving very long sentences; some sat on death row.

Is prison what the movies show?

No. Prison, in real life, is "exceptionally boring," he writes. His comparison is blunt and exact: prison is high school you can't leave. Same drama, same posters — Read more. Get your degree. Please stop doing drugs. Nobody films the pill line, the metal shop, the seventh re-reading of a novel.

The images pair with inmates' birthplaces, ages, years incarcerated, and their chosen item from one of the few things allowed into maximum security: a 256-color crayon box from a company he's contractually forbidden to name.

What's the catch?

Funding, for one. Support from the Leonian Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts didn't cover his expenses. He calls the whole thing "challenging, pleasant, awful, illuminating" — and one he hopes never to repeat.

And there's a confession at the end of every shoot day. After being searched — camera, recorder, white sheet, clothing — he'd return to the motel, open his laptop, and type the question he'd refused to ask in person: what did they do? He'd read about his new friends with horror. He'd know forever.

The work circles back to Van Gogh's 1880 letter to Theo — how can I be useful? — a question the photographer answers with an obligation rather than a conclusion. An exhibition, he hopes, comes one day. A book, he suspects, will follow.