Transylvania, Louisiana

Artist Deborah Luster American, born 1951

Date1999

MediumGelatin-silver print on aluminum plate

Dimensionsplate: 5 x 4in. (12.7 x 10.2cm)
frame: 10 1/4 x 9 1/4in. (26 x 23.5cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Friends of Photography

Object number2007.13.1

On View

Not on view

Label TextBetween 1998 and 2002, Deborah Luster photographed hundreds of prisoners at three Louisiana state prisons, resulting in a series of work titled One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. Printed on small aluminum plates, her intimate black-and-white portraits mimic nineteenth-century tintypes. The back of each plate is etched with information about the person depicted and might include his or her birth date, prison work assignment, length of sentence, and prison location. The subjects were asked to present themselves as they wanted to be portrayed, and many brought props, including costumes, photographs, and other prized possessions. Luster’s highly compelling portraits document an invisible population and resonate with emotions and untold stories.

As Luster has stated in reference to these works, “I cannot explain the need I felt to produce these portraits, because I do not fully understand it myself. I only know that it has something to do with the formal quality of loss and the way we cannot speak directly to those who have gone—how to touch the disappeared.”
[L. Dougherty, 2010]ProvenanceCreated Transylvania, LA, 1999; collection of the artist; [Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC]; sold to NCMA, 2007.

Published ReferencesOne Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2003), illus., unpaginated.

Linda Dougherty and Kinsey Katchka, "Compelling Portraits: Recent Acquisitions Purchased by the Friends of Photography," Preview: The Magazine of the North Carolina Museum of Art (September/October 2007), briefly discussed and illus. (color) 12.

Linda J. Dougherty, entry for Transylvania, Louisiana, in North Carolina Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, rev. ed. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2010), 584, illus. (color) 585.

“Outsiders: Facing the Camera,” in North Carolina Museum of Art Preview (Winter 2014), illus. (color) 21.
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, “Outsiders: Facing the Camera,” July 21, 2013–January 26, 2014. Object Rights Statement

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