For over a year, the photographer Danny Lyon photographed the daily lives of men shut away in seven penitentiaries across the state of Texas. “This work was from the beginning an effort to somehow emotionally convey the spirit of imprisonment shared by 250,000 men in the United States,” Lyon writes in the foreword to his resulting book Conversations with the Dead. “The resulting work is not meant to be seen as a study of the Texas Department of Corrections. Had I been given the opportunity, I could have made an analogous work in any of the fifty-one American prison systems.”