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| Winners of the Lange-Taylor Prize last year, photographer Deborah Luster and poet C. D. Wright 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." | |||
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They wanted to tell the stories and present the faces of these prisoners—simply and directly. In fact their work had already begun. 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. |
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Luster and Wright have worked together on a number of projects—sometimes the photographer presents the idea, sometimes the writer does—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, and Wright was moved to commit to the project. |
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