Architecture of Authority

For Architecture of Authority, Richard Ross spent years gaining access to spaces designed to assert control over the individuals who occupy them: churches, mosques, a preschool classroom, a Swedish courtroom, the United Nations, and the Iraqi National Assembly hall. The photographs move progressively toward starker expressions of institutional power, culminating in an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and a death chamber. Ross photographs these interiors in a cool, formal, deadpan style that lets the architecture itself carry the argument, drawing a visual line between the confessional and the interrogation room, the courtroom and the classroom. The book is accompanied by text from John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, and was published by Aperture in 2007. It engages directly with post-9/11 anxieties about surveillance, detention, and the erosion of individual liberty, work that was named among Photo District News' best books of 2007.