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The last meals of 12 death row inmates

These are the last meals eaten by 12 death row inmates before they were given the death penalty.

In the 31 American states that employ the use of the death penalty, prisoners are permitted to request a special last meal before they die.

No photographs of inmates’ actual last meals have ever been published. So Henry Hargreaves, a food photographer from Christchurch, New Zealand, decided to recreate the requests to bring to life the reality of the practice.

He told Business Insider: I dug into it, went a little deeper and found a public record [of the final meals]. For the first time, these people became humanized.

‘I thought it was really powerful that through food I was able to have an understanding of these people as real human beings.’

‘You don’t know if they're being served on china plates, or plastic, or eating on their laps, or at a wooden table, so I tried to explore all these variations.’