Deborah Luster

Deborah Luster uses photography, installation, and text to investigate her ongoing relationship with violence and its consequences. Following the brutal murder of her mother in 1988, Luster wrote, “I cannot explain the need I feel (to produce this work) because I do not fully understand it myself. I only know that it has something to do with the formal quality of loss and the way we cannot speak directly to those who have gone–how to touch the disappeared.”

Luster, who lives in New Orleans, worked for six years in the prisons of Louisiana, including the infamous, maximum-security prison at Angola, to produce an archive of 25,000 formal portraits of inmates. The series, called One Big Self, was an opportunity for those inmates to present themselves as they would be seen, bringing what they own or borrow or use: work tools, objects of their making, messages of their choosing, their bodies, themselves. Exhibited portraits are printed using silver gelatin emulsion on metal plates. Text is etched on the plate backs.

Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish is a photographic archive documenting contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans.