Opening and Artists' Talk by
Deborah Luster and C.D.Wright

Thursday, April 14, 2005
5:30 p.m.
List Art Center Auditorium
Reception to follow

In 1998 Deborah Luster began photographing inmates, who volunteered to participate, in three Louisiana prisons--the Transylvania Prison Farm, a minimum-security facility housing drug offenders and parole violator; the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, a 1,000-bed minimum- to maximum-security facility; and the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a maximum-security facility housing more than 5,000 men. She soon invited poet C.D. Wright to collaborate on the project. Luster and Wright have worked together on a number of projects--sometimes initiated by the photographer, sometimes by the writer. "I was skeptical that my art could turn itself toward that environment," says Wright. "I agreed to come to Louisiana to see what I could see, to see what she was seeing. It was a summons." Over the next three years, Luster and Wright visited often, taken photographs, conversing with inmates, and corresponding with them when they were away.  

The result is a powerful and haunting body of work, which the artists describe as an attempt to produce "an authentic document of Louisiana's prison population through word 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."

The title of the project, One Big Self, emphasizes the artists' humanitarian approach and our link with the inmates and prison system, not as "other," but as part of us. The title is taken from Terrence Malik, "Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody's a part of--all faces of the same man: one big self."

The exhibition includes both images and words.   Excerpts of Wright's poetry are reproduced on the gallery walls, and recordings of her reading are accessed via Bakelit telephones placed throughout the exhibition. Sixty of Luster images--4 x 5 silver prints on metal plates, reminiscent of tintypes--are framed and included in the exhibition. They are presented as well as loose images in a black, steel-drawered cabinet. Viewers are encouraged to handle the images and examine the personal information, supplied by each inmate and engraved on the back of each photo.  

Deborah Luster has produced two books with C.D. Wright, Just Whistle (Kelsey Street Press, 1993) and The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press, 1994). She is a 2001 recipient of the Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography from the Friends of Photography, San Francisco. Represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, Luster lives in Monroe and New Orleans, Louisiana.

C.D. Wright is the author of ten volumes of poetry, and an editor of Lost Roads Publishers. Her most recent book Steal Away (2001) is a selection of her verse over the last twenty years. Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon, 1998) is a book-length poem originating in a road trip by Luster and Wright visiting outsider artists in the Southeast. She and Luster also collaborated on a multimedia project titled The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas, focusing on the literature of their native state. Wright's work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, The New Yorker , and other publication. She is the recipient of a 2004 MacArthur Foundation Grant, as well Lila Wallace Writers' Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and an artist award form the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Wright is on the faculty of Brown University.