For years - and with seemingly limitless access - Richard Ross has been making unsettling and thought-provoking pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them.
From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques and diverse civic spaces including a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations, the images in "Architecture of Authority" build to ever harsher manifestations of power: an interrogation room at Guantánamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber.

Though visually cool, this work deals with hot-button issues - from the surveillance that increasingly intrudes on post-9/11 life to the abuse of power and the erosion of individual liberty.

“There are some places that you never want to see the insides of. These are the places sought out in Architecture of Authority. The photographs capture spaces both notorious and innocuous, from FBI Headquarters to high school corridors and office spaces.

The connections among the various architectures are striking. The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions. Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption.” - Richard Ross