b. 1951
Deborah Luster is best known for the series, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, which she undertook in 1998 with poet C. D. Wright. This collection of photographic portraits portrays prisoners from three Louisiana prisons including the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In her 2003 monograph she writes, “I chose to photograph each person as they presented their very own selves before my camera on the chance that I might be fortunate enough to contact, as poet Jack Gilbert writes ‘their hearts in their marvelous cases.’” These portraits—painstakingly printed on 5 x 4 inch sheets of black aluminum—are individualistic, diverse and emotionally compelling.
Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (Twin Palms Publishing, 2011) is a photographic archive documenting contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans, the homicide capital of the United States. The result is an exploration of the dizzyingly empty space at the core of violence. Luster approaches this invisible, excised population obliquely, with haunting, unpopulated photographs that seem to exist outside of time, simultaneously distant and chillingly close.
Tooth for an Eye ultimately expands into a mapping or chorography of a much beloved and beleaguered city, the topographical, architectural, material, and cultural phenomenon that is New Orleans. By approaching cityscapes through the disorienting context of homicide, the work disturbs the deep crust of stereotypical visual interpretations of New Orleans, a city that has been photographed repeatedly but still remains elusive.
Luster’s awards include the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize for Documentary Photography from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (with C.D. Wright), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, The John Guttman Award, a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, and a Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography (Friends of Photography, San Francisco).
Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (Twin Palms Publishing, 2011) is a photographic archive documenting contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans, the homicide capital of the United States. The result is an exploration of the dizzyingly empty space at the core of violence. Luster approaches this invisible, excised population obliquely, with haunting, unpopulated photographs that seem to exist outside of time, simultaneously distant and chillingly close.
Tooth for an Eye ultimately expands into a mapping or chorography of a much beloved and beleaguered city, the topographical, architectural, material, and cultural phenomenon that is New Orleans. By approaching cityscapes through the disorienting context of homicide, the work disturbs the deep crust of stereotypical visual interpretations of New Orleans, a city that has been photographed repeatedly but still remains elusive.
Luster’s awards include the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize for Documentary Photography from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (with C.D. Wright), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, The John Guttman Award, a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, and a Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography (Friends of Photography, San Francisco).
