These compelling Widelux views of an Arkansas prison farm were taken in 1975 by Bruce Jackson, an academic who accidentally became a photographer.

As a junior fellow at Harvard, Mr. Jackson had started taking pictures of prison life in Texas while writing about black convicts’ work songs. The pictures were intended as nothing more than visual notes for his ethnographic studies, though 20 were included in “Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons,” published by Harvard University Press in 1972. While in Texas, Mr. Jackson befriended a prison teacher, Terrell Don Hutto.

Mr. Hutto later became commissioner of the Arkansas Department of Correction, charged with humanizing convict farms that Time magazine described in 1968 as “hell in Arkansas.”

“I didn’t go to Arkansas to take pictures,” Mr. Jackson recalled. “I thought I would write about how this guy was changing the prisons. But I found more and more that my interest was in documenting it visually.”

By the third time he visited the Cummins Prison Farm, Mr. Jackson was taking his photographs seriously. In 1975, he bought a Widelux, a difficult camera to use, with a lens on a moving turret that covers a 140-degree field horizontally and makes 24-by-59-millimeter negatives. Though he had no idea at first how to use it, the Widelux changed his approach to photography.

In an e-mail account sent to the Lens blog, Mr. Jackson, 73, who is now the Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, wrote:

“Compared to a Nikon F2 or Leica M4 (the other cameras I had then), the Widelux is very slow and plodding. It’s fixed-focus (stopped down to f/11, just about everything is in focus). It takes maybe four turns of the knurled knob to advance a frame. And the viewfinder is only approximate, so I would find myself thinking the shot before I put the camera to my eye, rather than looking at the world through the viewfinder, as I tended to do with the Nikon.”

Mr. Jackson used the camera for the first time at Cummins. He took 231 frames resulting in 80 strong images — an astonishing shooting ratio.

Then they sat unseen until recently.

When he developed the film in 1975, six rolls had water spots that he could not fix (not before the advent of Adobe Photoshop CS2). And he couldn’t print the remaining negatives large enough in the small print trays in his darkroom.

But in recent years, after buying a large, high-quality digital printer and removing the water spots with Photoshop, Mr. Jackson had photographs that could be shown and were, as “Cummins Wide,” at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and as “Bruce Jackson: Cummins Wide, Photographs From the Arkansas State Prison,” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

His access in both prison systems was complete and unhindered. “A photographer could never get that kind of access today,” Mr. Jackson said.

He says he tried not to judge the prisoners or the guards. “When you work in a prison, you suspend all judgment,” he says. Yet there is one judgment he arrived at that he keeps to this day.

“All prisons are hell. The best prison is hell. The worst prisons are hell. There are gradations in hell, but it is all hell. If you forget that, you miss the point of what you’re looking at.”

When I first saw Mr. Jackson’s work, I couldn’t decide whether he was the creative forebear of Mikhael Subotsky or Danny Lyon — in Cinemascope. It turned out there is a link between Mr. Jackson and Mr. Lyon.

“Danny had been at the Texas prison rodeo and he’d asked the director, George Beto, if he could come down there for an extended time to take pictures,” Mr. Jackson recalled. “Beto said he could — if it was O.K. with Bruce Jackson, who taught English at the University at Buffalo.” An editor whom they shared gave Mr. Lyon a telephone number for Mr. Jackson.

“Danny called, then he stopped by with his girlfriend to visit me in Buffalo for a day or two. We liked one another. He told me about his work and showed me stuff. We knew some people in common. I wrote Dr. Beto and said that Danny was a serious person and that I thought he ought to let him have the same kind of freedom to move around the prison that they’d given me. Which is what they did.”