One Big Self

Résumé du livre

In 1998 photographer Deborah Luster and poet C.D. Wright set out to produce a record of Louisiana's prison population through image and text. One Big Self is a document to ward off forgetting, an opportunity for those 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 photographer has been commissioned, in a sense, by the inmates to make portraits for their loved ones--trying to ensure a balance between photograph and subject, to connect the viewer, whether mother, child, friend, or stranger, to the prisoner. The view is inherently personal. Luster's finished portraits are printed on metal in the manner of tintypes, durable snapshot mementos popularized during the 1860s and '70s. The persistent gaze of both inmate and documentarian are what we see. The text testifies to what is in and out of view. Luster and Wright have set out to explore the dimensions of prisoners' lives beyond the crimes that have come to define them. They suggest that our punitive models reflect who we are just as much as our reward systems do. Everyone somehow is implicated.