This 30-by-48-inch horizontal panorama documents the laundry room at Ohio Penitentiary—the facility where inmates processed clothing and linens for a prison population that sometimes exceeded 4,000. The four-foot width captures the industrial scale of institutional laundry serving one of America’s largest prisons.

Created in 1996, the work documents the laundry facility during the prison’s demolition period. Prison laundry represented both necessity and punishment: the massive loads requiring daily processing, the steam and heat creating miserable working conditions, the labor occupying inmates while maintaining institutional hygiene.

The horizontal format emphasizes the laundry room’s industrial layout: receiving, washing, drying, folding, and distribution areas organized for efficiency. The equipment and spatial organization resembled commercial laundry operations, the prison replicating industrial processes to handle institutional volumes.

The photo collage technique fragments this utilitarian space while revealing its functional organization. The assembled composition documents labor infrastructure that kept thousands of inmates clothed while subjecting those who worked there to conditions that modern workplace standards would prohibit.

Ohio Penitentiary’s laundry facilities vanished with the rest of the prison, demolished to make way for development that erased visible evidence of the institution that stood there for 150 years. This panorama preserves documentation of labor infrastructure, the workspace where inmates processed thousands of garments daily under conditions designed as punishment rather than productivity.