Tooth For An Eye

New Orleans is a well storied city. From its musical heritage to a renown culture of celebration, its distinctive architecture and a unique role in the history of African America, the city is purely itself and unlike any other in North America. It is tragically unique as well and photographer Deborah Luster has captured this aspect in a starkly beautiful portrait of the city through “a chorography of violence in Orleans Parish”. Her series of black and white photographs of homicide sites in the city are presented as circular images representing the entire vision of her cameras lens on 8″x10″ sheets of film. Each image is faced with a handwritten entry that documents the killing – in some cases multiple homicides committed at different times – that occurred at the site. The images themselves range from spare, beautiful landscapes to playful halloween kids to disturbingly decayed structures, all uniquely New Orleans. A haunting impression from some of these images is that of viewing the last thing ever seen. The sense of absence – that these photographs are pictures of something, someone, who is no longer present, a world that in a sense no longer exists – is sometimes overwhelming, like being in a strange, slow dream. She has documented the city itself in a process of change, almost of forgetting itself. I have watched people look at this book and emerge as from a very powerful trance, moved. It is not simply tragic. As with her beautiful work of portraiture, One Big Self, Deborah Luster creates an indescribeable experience that is complex and difficult and like having life itself told inside you. Chorography is an ancient term for a kind of geography that seeks to portray the qualities of place rather than the measurements of it. From within an all too present and difficult subject – violent killing – Ms Luster seems to give voice to the city of New Orleans itself, timber and tone of the telling somehow given through the eyes in these beautiful, almost anachronistic photographs. This is a magical book.