Luster was then offered an opportunity to return to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and photograph a Passion Play to be performed by inmates from Angola and Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel. Building on her deep experience in and connections with officials and inmates in Louisiana, for her Fellowship year, Deborah Luster continues her investigation of violence, place, and prison, with a study of Angola as place. Angola lies on 18,000 acres of the lower Mississippi valley first inhabited by Mastodons and later the Tunica Tribe; it takes its name from the antebellum Angola plantation that produced cotton and sugar cane and served as a slave-breeding farm. The site of the prison has been witness to slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, the Trustee System, segregation and mass incarceration. She proposes to spend her Fellowship year documenting Angola’s year-round schedule: the archaeological sites, the Portage of the Cross, the Mississippi prison dock, antebellum structures, inmates in the fields, the prison structures and signage, Death Row, and other locations.
Deborah Luster (1951– ) lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana and Galway, Ireland. Her work is held in major collections throughout the United States including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian, Washington, DC. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her photography including the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University (2000); the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers (2001); the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2013); and the Michael P. Smith Memorial Award for Documentary Photography, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (2015). Luster is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.
To see more of Deborah's work, visit her website.