US: "Do you ever imagine your own execution," William Quentin Jones was asked while serving time on death row for killing a man during a robbery.
"I've seen it," he said. "I don't know a soul there. I'm alone. It's a brightly lit room, and I know people are watching me but I can't see them. It's like they're behind a two-way glass; it's like they can see me but I can't see them."
And then what happens, asked his interviewer.
"I ask forgiveness," he said.
After 16 years on death row, Jones was executed by lethal injection at 2.16 a.m. on August 22nd last year at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. His family and relatives of the man he shot dead stood behind a pane of two-way glass to watch him die.
A larger-than-lifesize photograph of Jones, taken by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, went on display in London yesterday as part of an exhibition of 26 portraits of prisoners on death row in nine US states.
The exhibition is part of an international campaign by a Rome-based organisation called Hands Off Cain aimed at pressuring the UN General Assembly to establish a worldwide moratorium on execution.
Jones, who was 34 when he was executed, wears an orange prison-issue shirt and stands against a wall next to a large electric clock showing the time at 12 minutes to 12. His head is tilted slightly to his left. His face, like those of all Toscani's subjects, is devoid of expression.
In interviews accompanying the portraits, the condemned men and one woman, all convicted murderers, answer questions about what they miss, what prison smells like, what they'd like to do if they were free.
One man said he dreamed of snakes biting him, an image he assumed was an allegory for the lethal injection he'd been sentenced to die by. A lot of men on death row dreamed of snake bites, he said.
Many answers reveal the prisoners' loss of hope and regrets. Most contemplate the pointlessness of life, and many have turned to the Bible for comfort.
"It's a good life out there," says one. "Life is worth living."
Says another: "You realise your whole life's gone, and you wonder how it happened. You wonder why you were even born."
"There's nothing I miss," says another. "Other than being free."
James Edward Thomas (48) has been on death row since 1987, convicted of murder.
Asked does the death penalty work as a deterrent, he said: "No, it doesn't. To kill people to show that what they did was wrong, that never works. Someone kills someone else, then you kill him. Then you say that killing is wrong."
Toscani made his money in fashion advertising and his reputation for his often shocking pictures for the Benetton clothing company. He helped make Benetton rich and famous with poster campaigns designed "to bring social issues into advertising", he said.
"Most money used by advertising and media tells us nothing. What we get from advertising contradicts the values of human rights, making society trivial and greedy, addressing us just as consumers."
The death row portraits proved too much for Benetton when an American customer cancelled a $100 million contract, ending Toscani's 18-year relationship with the company.
He worked on the project for four years, he said, taking the photographs in 1998 and 1999.
President Bush, governor of Texas at the time, denied him permission "at the last minute" to enter any Texan prisons. "History will judge Bush as a mass murderer," Toscani said.
The death penalty, he said, "is like slavery; one day people will look back and see capital punishment as a primitive expression of an inhuman race".
Hands Off Cain is supported by the European Commission, and hopes to encourage Britain to back a UN moratorium resolution next year. Treasurer Ms Elizabetta Zamparutti said nations that introduced moratoria usually ended up abolishing execution.
Most countries that sentenced prisoners to death were dictatorships, she said, citing China and Iran as the worst offenders.
China executes more than 5,000 people a year, more than the rest of the world put together, and often for minor offences. Because the communist government regards execution figures as a state secret, human rights groups believe the real figure is much higher.
Iran, Ms Zamparutti said, executes the same number of prisoners on a per capita basis.
She said the campaign hoped to persuade African nations to back the resolution, though conceded that China historically rallies support among its African partners to vote down proposals it views as against its interests.
"What we need is economic awareness, so that companies refuse to produce goods in countries like China that use the death penalty," Toscani said.