DEBORAH LUSTER

For New Orleans-based Deborah Luster, photography is a cathartic exercise. In 1998, the photographer's mother was murdered. Grief-stricken, Luster embarked the same year on a project of photographing inmates, many of them convicted of violent crimes, in state prisons in Louisiana. After completing the countless portraits in One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, Luster dedicated the next decade to documenting the remnants of violence in her hometown.

Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in New Orleans Parish is a photographic archive of contemporary and historical homicide sites in New Orleans, where the homicide rate has, historically and today, numbered significantly higher than the national average. Luster's meticulous research of the sites and the crimes committed there is evident. Each photograph is accompanied by the location, date and time, the victim's name, and even notes about the event, as in 1100 Block North Prieur. February 28, 2007. Herbert Preston (19). Recently returned Katrina evacuee. Gunshots to head and body.

On site, Luster shoots with an 8 x 10 Deardorff field camera. The photograph's circular format, often referred to as a peephole or a gun scope, results from a particular lens used to frame the image. Luster uses extended exposure times of approximately ninety seconds to create a hauntingly blurry picture of the city's everchanging landscape, where graffiti-marked walls and bullet-punctured surfaces recur. Ultimately, the series examines something that no longer exists-an invisible, absent population-approached obliquely and through reference, where only vacant scenes of New Orleans urban sprawl are pictured.

The title of the series is also noteworthy. Referencing language in the Old and New Testaments, Tooth for an Eye is a statement about the laws of retaliation for crime. Though it is often written “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Luster revises and reverses the statement to underscore the flaws in the legal system and its inability to achieve retribution in equal measure.

The use of the word chorography, derived from the Greek khoros or “region,” describes the artist's practice of surveying a specific place-the chaotic collection of New Orleans' districts, wards, and streets, none of which wholly aligns with one another-as it relates to the city's violence and her personal reinvestigation of past crimes. Each photograph's detailed title further illustrates her systematic description and mapping of New Orleans.

Luster's photographs illustrate how in the city of New Orleans-so alive with history and culture-there exists a porousness between the worlds of the living and the dead, where neither world lives nor dies free of the other's space or influence.

EXHIBITIONS

Southern Exposure: Portraits of a Changing Landscape

MAY 16, 2015 - AUGUST 30, 2015