As he spent some time in the early summer of 1992 talking to Edward Dean Kennedy, artist Lou Jones found that they had a fair amount in common. Both men were born near Boston. They shared opinions on music and politics. They were the same age, and they even looked a bit alike. What separated them was that 14 years earlier, Kennedy had killed a motel clerk. Four years later, a brief escape from prison ended with two more people dead.

Jones photographed Kennedyas Kennedy awaited execution for his 1982 crimes at a Florida State Prison in Starke. In the photo Kennedy sits beyond a half-opened door. His wrists are cuffed and a ladder stands against a wall behind him. About six weeks after the photo was taken, Kennedy was executed in Florida's electric chair.

Kennedy was one of about two dozen death row inmates from across the country who Jones and his colleagues visited, interviewed and photographed over a period of six years in the early 1990s. The exhibit, Final Exposure: Photos From Death Row by Lou Jones,opened yesterday at the Gallery at New England College in Henniker.

"You're going to experience powerful emotion when you look at Lou Jones's works," said Inez McDermott, director of general education and assistant professor of art at NEC. "What I like about it is that that emotion is different for everybody - Lou's message, over and over, basically, is 'Make up your own mind.'"

You can see the artistic eye in the composition, the stark, almost overdeveloped printing of the black-and-white prints, and a sense of irony. Jones photographs Pennsylvania death row Inmate Nicholas Yarris sitting backward in a chair. Above him is a colorful mural with the line (from Shakespeare's Richard III) that reads "Take all the swift advantage of the hours."

Jones's photographs also make sociological comments, although such statements are left to the viewer to interpret.

Inmates seem to suggest that waiting for death - and not necessarily execution itself - is cruel and unusual. In writing about inmate Abdullah Bashir, Jones writes, "He had suffered many stays of execution." Bashir, who leans in a slightly submissive posture against a white wall, was put to death by lethal injection in 1993, 11 years after he murdered a woman in a Houston theater who had stayed late at work.

Jones touches frequently on the theme that so much time passes between sentence and death that the person executed often bears little resemblance to the enraged and often drug-addled person who committed the offense. Once off the street, death row inmates often find sobriety, religion, even themselves.

The pictures - a glimpse into death rows nationwide - also reveal that the majority of those sentenced to death are non-white. Many were also raised in poverty, undereducated and considered throwaways by society.

But while Jones offers identities and humanity to his subjects, he also holds them responsible for their actions . Robert West, photographed in Huntsville Texas, looks like the kind of guy you might run into in a bar. He's prematurely balding and has a bit of a paunch and a tough-guy expression that isn't quite convincing. He doesn't look like the kind of guy who wouldtie a woman to a motel room bed with fishing twine, beat her and stab her to death. But he did.

"I really appreciate that Jones give all the information, but holds back on his view," said McDermott. "For most artists, having a point of view and creating work that gets that point of view across is the very point - Lou Jones refrains from doing that."

McDermott finds Jones's balancing act especially important for a gallery that is in a college setting.

"We want students to be able to make up their own minds - to be able to go in, see the pictures, feel and arrive at their own opinions,"said McDermott. "It's critical thinking - he's not telling us what to think; he's telling us to think."

Many of the inmates Jones photographed claimed they were innocent, but Jones gives little credence to those stories. And he may have been as surprised as anyone when Nicholas Yarris - a man sentenced to death for a murder in 1983 and photographed under the Richard III mural at the Huntington, Pa., prison - was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003.

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