Tooth for an Eye
Deborah Luster
The city of New Orleans is a topographical/architectural/material/cultural phenomenon with a diverse population participating in raucously colorful and fascinating pursuits and rituals. Homicide is a cultural fact of the life in the city as well. In her second book, Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish, Deborah Luster explores the city in a new way, creating a compelling portrait in the form of a photographic archive of contemporary and historic homicide sites. Following on from her first book, Prisoners of Louisiana, Tooth for an Eye explores the themes of loss and remembrance in a series of tondo photographs that offer an opportunity for the viewer to enter deeper into the idea of the city, a place where life and death coexist, neither free of the other's influence.
deborahluster.com/tooth-for-an-eye
Deborah Luster (b. 1951, USA) is a visual artist using photography, installation and text to investigate violence, its social constructs and its consequences. She 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 over 1500 prisoners from three Louisiana prisons including the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (2011) is a photographic archive documenting contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans, the homicide capital of the United States. Luster's work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She was awarded the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize for Documentary Photography from the Center for Documentary. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, New Orleans Museum of Art, and other notable public and private collections.
https://www.deborahluster.com/
Specifications / Credits
Title: Tooth for an Eye (Book)
Artist: Deborah Luster
Year: 2011
Limited edition of 26 copies in a clamshell box with a hand-pulled gravure print signed by the artist
Book: 30 duotone illustrations, 64 pp
ISBN: 3894054638
Photogravure: The Brodsky Center (Randy Hemminghaus)
Print Size: 17x24in
Limited Edition: 26
Signed and stamped (verso)
Produced by: Twin Palms Publishing
Collection: Leandro Villaro/Penumbra Foundation