Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana

DEBORAH LUSTER AND C.D. WRIGHT (2000)

In 1998 Deborah Luster started photographing in three Louisiana prisons: the Transylvania Prison Farm, a minimum-security facility housing drug offenders and parole violators; Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, a 1,000-bed minimum-, medium-, and maximum-security facility located in St. Gabriel; and Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a maximum-security facility housing more than 5,000 men on 18,000 acres of fertile Delta, surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River. Luster and C.D. Wright had worked together on a number of projects, so as Luster continued her work with the Louisiana inmates, she decided to ask Wright to collaborate. In the summer of 1999, the two visited the prisons together.
They set out to produce, in their words, “an authentic document of Louisiana’s prison population through image and text—a document to ward off forgetting, an opportunity for the 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.”

Photographs and poems are from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana by Deborah Luster and C.D. Wright (Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2003).


PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Deborah Luster




POETRY
By C.D. Wright

View poems (64 kb)







banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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