Prospect New Orleans: Levee Stream

PROSPECT 4: “Levee Stream,” Prospect New Orleans. The legendary Houston arts collective, Otabenga Jones and Associates, and Peabody Award-winning NPR producers, The Kitchen Sisters, and the acclaimed international arts organization, Project& come together on Bayou Road in New Orleans on November 19th. “Levee Stream” is a day of close listening, unusual encounters, neighborhood revelation and food. Of course food.

On Sunday, November 19th, opening weekend of Prospect.4, the legendary Houston arts collective, Otabenga Jones and Associates, Peabody Award-winning NPR producers, The Kitchen Sisters, and the acclaimed arts organization, Project& come together on Bayou Road in New Orleans to present “Levee Stream,” a site specific-street corner-pop-up Cadillac radio station-installation.  

Part block party, part soapbox, “Levee Stream” is live from noon til five, broadcasting at the confluence of Bayou Road, Desoto and N.Dorgenois — a mix of live conversation and interviews with an array of international artists in town for Prospect.4, Bayou Road neighborhood regulars, entrepreneurs and visionaries, New Orleans artists and activists, DJs, live music, and a five hour “sonic prayer flag” that will unfurl across the afternoon and the neighborhood full of New Orleans voices, shards of sound and archival audio. Levee Stream is a day of close listening, unusual encounters, neighborhood revelation and food. Of course food. Meet us on the corner. Hear the stories, voices, visions, issues and music coming live at the “station.” Record your own story in the tiny shotgun shack on wheels (built by six high school students from unCommon Construction) on the street next to Caddy.

A few of the people and performances appearing live on Sunday afternoon include: Cole Williams, singer, bandleader, WWOZ DJ and arts activist will host the day. Chicken Violins — Rebecca Crenshaw came to New Orleans right after Katrina. A musician and music teacher she signed up with ArtistCorp who were bringing music teachers back in to New Orleans public school after the flood. She’ll be bring a group of students from The Homer Plessy School. Organist Joe Krown will be on the Hammond B3 throughout the day. New Orleans’ DJ RqAway (the people’s DJ) will be spinning in the afternoon.

Robert King and Albert Woodfox of the Angola Three — Robert King spent 29 years in solitary confinement in Angola Penitentiary. Since his release, after being found not guilty, he has worked ceaselessly, on behalf of prisoners rights and for justice and for political prisoners around the world.

A multitude of artists from Prospect.4 will talk of their new works at the corner cadillac station including Hank Willis Thomas, Monique Verdin & Raymond “Moose” Jackson, John Akomfrah, Xaviera Simmons, Jeff Whetstone, Donna Conlon & Jonathan Harker, Penny Siopis, Odili Donald Odita, Cauleen Smith and Kiluanji Kia Henda, plus P.4 Artistic Director Trevor Schoonmaker, and photographer Deborah Luster. Gia Hamilton from the Joan Mitchell Center will also be part of the mix. DJ Flash Gordon Parks — Ethnomusicologist, collector, documentarian and DJ. Like Otabenga Jones & Associates, Flash comes from Houston with his crates and his big mind and mouth to spin some music and the stories behind it. Plessy & Ferguson — On June 7,1892 Homer Plessy, a shoemaker and light-skinned, free man of color bought a first class ticket, boarded a train and sat in the whites-only railway car of a New Orleans train in an effort to challenge the segregation laws of the era. Judge John H. Ferguson did the ruling that held in place the Jim Crow “separate but equal” laws that stood in the south, and went to the Supreme Court under the name Plessy vs Ferguson, til the Brown vs Board of Education decision upended it in 1954.

The Sonic Prayer Flag — Voices, stories and shards of sound and music from The Kitchen Sisters haunting and evocative New Orleans sound and storyscape will be part of the live mix of the day. The Jones Sisters — Four New Orleans sisters, age 12-18 who have been singing together for nine years and sing knock-out gospel and organ, and won the Rhythm of Gospel Award for Youth/ Young Adult Artist of the year, will power the station-installation on air at noon on Sunday. Solitary Gardens — Artist and social activist, Jackie Sumell, who with Herman Wallace of the Angola Three created the powerful project, “Herman’s House” has ignited a new vision “Solitary Gardens” a project at the intersection of public art, alternative land-use and social sculpture, planting gardens designed after 6×9 solitary confinement cells throughout the city of New Orleans to make graphic the issues of justice, incarceration and solitary confinement and propel and provoke a dialogue with the community and with prisoners. Floating Cities — David Waggoner, water visionary and architect with the firm Waggoner & Ball has been at the forefront of designing innovative, sustainable stormwater management plan systems in post-Katrina New Orleans. He speaks his vision, floating streets and water gardens. We’ll also hear from Julia Kumar Drapkin from ISeeChange and Rachel Bruenlin from the Neighborhood Story Project.

Voices and stories from the neighborhood including Dr. Dwight McKenna & Beverly Stanton McKenna, founders of the New Orleans Tribune; creators of Le Musée de Free People of Color; Mama Vera Warren-Wilson from the Community Book Center, one of the hubs of black culture on Bayou Road in the 7th Ward; Carla Williams from Material Life; Mannie King of Froot Orleans; Mother Nature from the Coco Hut; Rachel Breunlin from the Neighborhood Story Project; David Montana and Big Queen Assesswa Amour; the Cupcake Ferries; and neighborhood stalwart, healer, soapmaker and singer, Sister Andaiye Alimaya of The King and Queen Emporium and Zion Trinity, whose corner will host the Cadillac. Matt Knowles from Domino Sound, the mighty vintage record store in the neighborhood will also DJ the day.

Skylar Fein & Skaters from the Parisite Skateboard Park — In the wake of Katrina, after their illegal, unofficial DIY skateboard park was torn down by the city, a group of skateboarders, spearheaded by P.1 artist Skylar Fein, created a nonprofit called Transitional Spaces. In partnership with a construction firm, the city, and Tulane they created Parisite Skate Park, an 18,000 square foot space under Interstate 610 Overpass in Gentilly, the first public skatepark in the New Orleans history

Food will come from the neighborhood and beyond — and will change with the day, from Pagoda Cafe, Coco Hut, The Half Shell, Alon Shaya & Pomegranate Hospitality, Graison Gill & Bellegarde Bakery, Cal Peternell formerly of Chez Panisse, Charlie Hallowell of Pizzaiolo and Boot & Shoe Service, Uncorked and the New Orleans Ice Cream Company.

Others who will join us at the Cadillac include New Orleans writer Randy Fertel; host of American Routes, Nick Spitzer; the legendary DJ Soul Sister; Leona Tate of the McDonogh Three; chef Poppy Tooker and more.

For more information about Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp visit prospectneworleans.org

Fugitive Waves – One Big Self & Remembering Poet C.D. Wright

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Our show today is in honor of the beloved poet C. D. Wright, who unexpectedly passed away recently. We were fortunate to spend time with her just a few months back at the Center for Documentary Studies where she read from her book “One With Others” which received a National Book Critic Circle Award. C. D., born in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, was a professor of literary arts at Brown University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, a past poet laureate of Rhode Island, an author of over a dozen books—among so much more.

The New York Times wrote: “Her work—characterized by linguistic experimentation, stylistic innovation and an ever shifting thematic canvas—was rooted in her southern heritage yet, at the same time utterly beyond category.” Like C. D. herself.

We interviewed C. D. in 2009 as part of a story we produced for our Hidden World of Girls series on NPR–and like with all of our stories—there are hours and hours of tape behind every minute of what you hear in the final piece.

So today we’re going to play our original story—a story of family, crime and the power of art to grapple with the unimaginable—and then we’re going to let it roll. To hear C. D. read from her work, and talk about life, poetry and her longtime collaboration with Deborah Luster.

A story of family, crime and the power of art to grapple with some of society’s hardest issues.
Produced by The Kitchen Sisters
In collaboration with Nathan Dalton
Mixed by Jim McKee

“My mom… It’s hard to talk about your mom. She was very glamorous but she never put on any airs. There was no saditty with her. She was infected with that southern ancestor worship thing, all into the arts of dress and manners and home and the table, conversation and story telling. She was a shutterbug.

“IN OUR FAMILY, THE CAMERA WAS MANNED BY A WOMAN”

Deborah Luster’s mother and father divorced when she was a baby and she went to live with her grandparents in Arkansas. She and her mom communicated through photographs. “If I got a new coat I would have to be photographed and usually I didn’t want to be photographed so it would be the back of the coat. There would be photographs of me and my cat, my grandfather and me.”

From her mother, Deborah would receive posed photographs. “She would dress up even when she was cooking. Designer clothes and high heels. I mean, she’d wear a mink coat to a tractor pull, think nothing of it. Red hair. Big glamourpuss.”

APRIL 1, 1988

On April 1, April Fools Day, 1988, Deborah’s mother was murdered in her bed by a contract killer who came in through her kitchen window, down her hall and shot her five times in the head. Deborah believed she had seen the man at one time so she reasoned that he might be after her as well. For seven years she lived in terror until they arrested the man and he was tried and convicted. They have never, however, caught the person who hired her mother’s killer.

After her mother’s death Deborah started to photograph. “My mom had photographed constantly, my grandmother had photographed and constantly documented our family. Photography became something that I could think to do to try to dig out of the place I had found myself.”

“Perhaps I was channeling my ancestors in the years following the deaths of my mother and grandmother. Perhaps it was their spirits that moved me to pick up a camera—for in our family, the camera was manned by women. It was my turn. Or perhaps I picked up the camera out of desperation. I did need a tool. I was buried under the loss of my family members. The world was a sinister one. I was awake and numb and frightened. How could I sleep under the same stars as my mother’s murderer? I used the camera to dig out. I found that I was still capable of making contact”.

“THERE SEEMED TO BE A LOT OF PRISONS”

Deborah had moved to Monroe in northern Louisiana. In 1998 she was sent  out with other photographers by The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities to photograph in the region in support of an empowerment zone application for the state’s very impoverished.

“Debbie started noticing that the landscape was fairly emptied out,” remembered poet C.D. Wright, Deborah’s friend and collaborator. “Then she noticed that it was fairly emptied out but for the fact that there seemed to be a lot of prisons. And she thought, ‘well maybe that’s where everybody is.” Which, in fact, is where everybody is.”

On a Sunday afternoon Deborah knocked on the gates of a small prison on the banks of the Tensas River. The warden came out and she asked if she might photograph some of the inmates there. He said yes.

“I photographed there once and realized it was a project I had been looking for for a long time, something in response to the murder of my mother,” said Deborah. “It was like it lifted when I went in through the gates it became something else.”

“I CAME TO PHOTOGRAPH THAT PERSON, NOT THAT PERSON IN PRISON”

Deborah  got entrance to the women’s prison in St. Gabriel, the minimum security male prison in Transylvania and Angola Maximum Security prison in Louisiana. She teamed up with her long time collaborator, C.D. Wright and the two began working together on the project.

Deborah started taking very straightforward formal portraits. “I would say to the prisoners, you’re an invisible population, and this is your opportunity to show the world who you are, to present yourself to the world as you would be seen. One man went in and came back out and he had written the world “freedom” on a piece of notebook paper.”

For the most part, the inmates posed themselves.  They might want to hold something like a box of valentine candy or a family photo. One woman wanted to hold her shoe.

Deborah would take in a few pieces of black velvet and some duct tape, find a place that had good light and tape up her backdrop. She didn’t want any sort of sign of prison life.  “I didn’t want that to get in the way of the person I was photographing. What I came to photograph was that person, not that person in prison.”
“I was trying to photograph as many inmates as I possibly could, because I wanted to really show the numbers of people who are incarcerated, to try to communicate to some degree, just how many y of our population reside in prisons.”

At Angola, Deborah photographed prisoners in the cotton fields where they still pick cotton by hand.

While Deborah photographed, CD Wright would interview and observe. One poem she wrote was inspired by overheard conversations on the field line—an entry level job at Angola State Penitentiary where prison farm laborers make about eight cents an hour.

LISTEN: C.D.Wright-Overheard in the Field Line

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“IN LOUISIANA EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE A COSTUME…”

Deborah photographed the women at their Mardi Gras celebration and at the Halloween haunted house at at San Gabriel women’s prison. “There were all of these traditional Louisiana costumes and archetypes,” said Deborah. “Alligator Girl, Rat Face. They run this haunted house in the gymnasium. There’s the snake room, the bird room, the bat room. And there’s the execution chamber where one inmate sits in an electric chair, and the other inmate  is the executioner, and she throws a switch, and this strobe light goes on behind the head of the woman that’s supposedly being executed, and that woman starts jumping around. There’s a lot of black humor there.”

The women make their costumes out of sheets, table clothes and available materials. “The winning costumes were big striped uniforms,” said CD Wright. “Uniforms with big tall Dr. Seuss like striped hats. They were made from uniforms of the women in maximum security who could not participate in either Halloween or Mardi Gras. So those were made in their honor.”

“In Louisiana, everything feels like a costume,” said CD Wright. “The inmates had different uniforms for all of the different positions in the prison. The prisoners were identified by their work detail uniforms. People in culinary arts wore big baker hats and white jackets.”

“This man who is scarred so badly, we heard that his brother threw a tire over his head and set it on fire,” explained CD Wright. “He was so dignified. He was beautiful, really. He had green eyes. He always looked absolutely, directly at the camera. I found him very striking. Not just because he was so scarred, but because of the dignity he brought to his very disfigured face.”

The photographs are done on aluminum photographic plates reminiscent of tintypes. The aluminum is treated with gelatin silver as you would treat a canvas with gesso before you paint on it. Deborah makes paper copies of the aluminum plates for the prisoners. They are not allowed to have sharp metal objects. The photographs are small, only a little larger than a postcard. “I wanted to preserve the intimacy of these very formal photographs,” Deborah said.

THEY MADE THEMSELVES SO VULNERABLE TO ME

At Angola where 90 percent of the men that go there, die there, it was very sober. There was no clowning around. It was a very formal. The way they would pose themselves was very sort of nineteenth century.

“For the most part they presented themselves as they wanted to be presented, looking out,” said CD Wright.  It as was all voluntary. She returned a portion of the funds that she received from selling the plates which are on aluminum to the prisoners fund. With which they buy popcorn and books and undershirts and personal items.

Deborah made prints for each person she photographed. She returned 25,000 prints to inmates.

At one point Deborah was walking down the block at Angola, in the middle of the 18,000-acre prison, near one of the dormitories there.    And a voice behind her said, “You’ve been to the women’s prison at St. Gabriel, haven’t you?”  And she said, “Now how would you know that?”  And the man said, “Because I sent my girlfriend a picture you took of me, and she sent me one back just like it.”  “So  there were these little images are flying between the prisons,” said Deborah, ” and, I thought that’s what it was all about.”

“They made themselves so vulnerable to me and it’s not often that you have an encounter like that. I know a lot of it was that they were actually posing for the people that they loved, their husbands, their wives, their children.”

“There was a woman who asked to be photographed,” said Deborah. “She said ‘I’ve been here 15 years. I’m down for 99 years. I have 19 children. My children haven’t spoken to me since I came to prison. Perhaps if I had some photographs I could send them it would soften their hearts to me.’ A few months later she said, ‘Four of my children came to visit me. The baby came and he’s nineteen. He was five years old when I came to prison.'”

SOMETHING MY MOTHER WOULD HAVE DONE

“For me,” said Deborah. “It became this project about the importance of the personal photograph, and what that little slip of paper, or piece of tin can mean to a person.”

“I think this project is the kind of thing my mother would have done,” said Deborah. “She had this way of looking right through the veneer, right into people. She could see the bottom in people. She liked to photograph her family, the food on your plate, you brushing your teeth. She photographed what she loved and that’s what she loved.”

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How We Found this Story

We have been thinking about this girls series for a long time, even while we were in the middle of the Hidden Kitchens project. One of our central methods is to say everything out loud, tell everyone we know and don’t know about what it is we’re working on and looking for. We have a good nose for stories, but sometimes the people we know have an even better one. This story, “Deborah Luster: One Big Self” came to us because one night writer Michael Ondaatje and his wife, writer Linda Spalding were asking what new story we were working on. We described a new project we were just beginning to imagine about the secret life of girls around the world. Michael jumped in, “One Big Self. You have to see it. You have to know about Deborah Luster and her photographs and her collaboration with her C.D. Wright, the poet. They call it “One Big Self.” He told us Deborah’s story and we were mesmerized.

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“AMERICA IS A THEME PARK OF VIOLENCE…” C. D. Wright

Poet CD Wright was a long-time friend and colleague of Deborah Luster who collaborated with her on One Big Self. Here are some excerpts from her interview.

Can you talk about your collaboration with Deborah Luster?

Deborah and I met at the University of Arkansas. I was a teaching assistant and she was a senior undergraduate, so we’ve known each other for some time. We have similar sensibilities, the same kind of edgy sense of humor and the same sort of political orientation. And we have complimentary aesthetics. We’ve worked on several projects together. Both photographers and poets are used to working in solitude so it’s sometimes testing to try to work out certain visions, but our visions are actually very compatible.

This project was initiated by Deborah who is working out a long term relationship to violence which began with her mother’s murder. She’s trying to include every point of view. This is a very sympathetic project for someone who is a survivor of such a violent act. The decision from the beginning was to photograph inmates in their whole selves, their better selves.

The title of the project comes from a sentence by Terrence Malik: “Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody’s a part of–all faces of the same man: one big self.”

The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept that — whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily aside — the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, to see prisoners among others, as they elect to be seen. In “their larger selves.”

LISTEN: Wright talks about writing text for One Big Self

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What significance do you feel these photographs had for the inmates?

In the maximum security prison, the mirrors are stainless steel, so there’s a kind of warp—your reflection is not that clear. So many of these inmates don’t see themselves for years at a stretch, they don’t see the real delineation of their faces. And time passes. I think that many of them are not aware of the details of their physical changes.

The last photograph for many of these prisoners is their mug shot. In Deborah’s photos prisoners presented themselves as they wanted to be presented, looking out. Dressed in costume, holding up a sign, a photo or something they cared about.

Family portraiture, is a big tradition in the south, so these photographs were another opportunity to be included in that tradition. It was important that they were posed and dignified pictures. We tried very hard not to idealize people there; most of them were not there for spitting on the sidewalk, they had done really bad things. Most of them had brought some harm of some kind to somebody else.

LISTEN: Wright reads from One Big Self

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MORE POEMS FROM ONE BIG SELF:

If I were you:

 

Screw up today, and it’s solitary, Sister Woman, the padded dress with the food log to gnaw on.  This is where you enter the eye of the far.  The air is foul.  The dirt is gumbo.  Avoid all physical contact.  Come nightfall the bugs will carry you off.  I don’t have a clue, do I?

_______________________

they sit on the slab walk, smoke and talk

They pass a stuffed bunny from hand to hand

for their turn in front of the camera

The church ladies are out on soul patrol

they’ve got ditty bags for the prisoners

Poster:  Black History, women’s prison

The blacker the college

The sweeter the knowledge

Navy is housekeeping

Khaki is for peer tutor

 

The search for Molly is forty-five days old

 

If you were a felon

You’d be home now

Cradle my head Sister

until the last rivet of grief is secure

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One Big Self was produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva in collaboration with Nathan Dalton and mixed by Jim McKee.

We’d like to thank our dear friends and sisters in collaboration – C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster. We’d also like to thank Jack Woody of Twelve Trees press, Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding for leading us to this story, Randy Fertel for his generous heart and support, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the arts for their support of Hidden World of Girls.

C.D. Wright’s latest book is a collection of essays published in January 2016. It’s called The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. Published by Copper Canyon Press.

RADIOTOPIA:
Fugitive Waves is produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell.
We’re part of Radiotopia from PRX – a collective of the best story-driven, creative cutting edge radio shows on earth.

From all of us at Radiotopia, many thanks for listening, sharing these programs with your friends and supporting this new experiment in supporting storytelling.

We’d like to thank the many of you who have donated to Radiotopia and The Kitchens Sisters, especially designer and illustrator Jez Burrows, whose most recent project Dictionary Stories is a collection of very short stories entirely composed from example sentences from the dictionary. Find it at dictionarystories.com.

One Big Self: The Hidden World of Deborah Luster & C. D. Wright

Subscribe to the podcast: iTunes | Stitcher | RSS

Our show today is in honor of the beloved poet C. D. Wright, who unexpectedly passed away recently. We were fortunate to spend time with her just a few months back at the Center for Documentary Studies where she read from her book “One With Others” which received a National Book Critic Circle Award. C. D., born in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, was a professor of literary arts at Brown University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, a past poet laureate of Rhode Island, an author of over a dozen books—among so much more.

The New York Times wrote: “Her work—characterized by linguistic experimentation, stylistic innovation and an ever shifting thematic canvas—was rooted in her southern heritage yet, at the same time utterly beyond category.” Like C.D. herself.

We interviewed C. D. in 2009 as part of a story we produced for our Hidden World of Girls series on NPR–and like with all of our stories—there are hours and hours of tape behind every minute of what you hear in the final piece.

So today we’re going to play our original story—a story of family, crime and the power of art to grapple with the unimaginable—and then we’re going to let it roll. To hear C. D. read from her work, and talk about life, poetry and her longtime collaboration with Deborah Luster.

A story of family, crime and the power of art to grapple with some of society’s hardest issues.
Produced by The Kitchen Sisters
In collaboration with Nathan Dalton
Mixed by Jim McKee

“My mom… It’s hard to talk about your mom. She was very glamorous but she never put on any airs. There was no saditty with her. She was infected with that southern ancestor worship thing, all into the arts of dress and manners and home and the table, conversation and story telling. She was a shutterbug.

“IN OUR FAMILY, THE CAMERA WAS MANNED BY A WOMAN”

Deborah Luster’s mother and father divorced when she was a baby and she went to live with her grandparents in Arkansas. She and her mom communicated through photographs. “If I got a new coat I would have to be photographed and usually I didn’t want to be photographed so it would be the back of the coat. There would be photographs of me and my cat, my grandfather and me.”

From her mother, Deborah would receive posed photographs. “She would dress up even when she was cooking. Designer clothes and high heels. I mean, she’d wear a mink coat to a tractor pull, think nothing of it. Red hair. Big glamourpuss.”

APRIL 1, 1988

On April 1, April Fools Day, 1988, Deborah’s mother was murdered in her bed by a contract killer who came in through her kitchen window, down her hall and shot her five times in the head. Deborah believed she had seen the man at one time so she reasoned that he might be after her as well. For seven years she lived in terror until they arrested the man and he was tried and convicted. They have never, however, caught the person who hired her mother’s killer.

After her mother’s death Deborah started to photograph. “My mom had photographed constantly, my grandmother had photographed and constantly documented our family. Photography became something that I could think to do to try to dig out of the place I had found myself.”

“Perhaps I was channeling my ancestors in the years following the deaths of my mother and grandmother. Perhaps it was their spirits that moved me to pick up a camera—for in our family, the camera was manned by women. It was my turn. Or perhaps I picked up the camera out of desperation. I did need a tool. I was buried under the loss of my family members. The world was a sinister one. I was awake and numb and frightened. How could I sleep under the same stars as my mother’s murderer? I used the camera to dig out. I found that I was still capable of making contact”.

“THERE SEEMED TO BE A LOT OF PRISONS”

Deborah had moved to Monroe in northern Louisiana. In 1998 she was sent  out with other photographers by The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities to photograph in the region in support of an empowerment zone application for the state’s very impoverished.

“Debbie started noticing that the landscape was fairly emptied out,” remembered poet C.D. Wright, Deborah’s friend and collaborator. “Then she noticed that it was fairly emptied out but for the fact that there seemed to be a lot of prisons. And she thought, ‘well maybe that’s where everybody is.” Which, in fact, is where everybody is.”

On a Sunday afternoon Deborah knocked on the gates of a small prison on the banks of the Tensas River. The warden came out and she asked if she might photograph some of the inmates there. He said yes.

“I photographed there once and realized it was a project I had been looking for for a long time, something in response to the murder of my mother,” said Deborah. “It was like it lifted when I went in through the gates it became something else.”

“I CAME TO PHOTOGRAPH THAT PERSON, NOT THAT PERSON IN PRISON”

Deborah  got entrance to the women’s prison in St. Gabriel, the minimum security male prison in Transylvania and Angola Maximum Security prison in Louisiana. She teamed up with her long time collaborator, C.D. Wright and the two began working together on the project.

Deborah started taking very straightforward formal portraits. “I would say to the prisoners, you’re an invisible population, and this is your opportunity to show the world who you are, to present yourself to the world as you would be seen. One man went in and came back out and he had written the world “freedom” on a piece of notebook paper.”

For the most part, the inmates posed themselves.  They might want to hold something like a box of valentine candy or a family photo. One woman wanted to hold her shoe.

Deborah would take in a few pieces of black velvet and some duct tape, find a place that had good light and tape up her backdrop. She didn’t want any sort of sign of prison life.  “I didn’t want that to get in the way of the person I was photographing. What I came to photograph was that person, not that person in prison.”
“I was trying to photograph as many inmates as I possibly could, because I wanted to really show the numbers of people who are incarcerated, to try to communicate to some degree, just how many y of our population reside in prisons.”

At Angola, Deborah photographed prisoners in the cotton fields where they still pick cotton by hand.

While Deborah photographed, CD Wright would interview and observe. One poem she wrote was inspired by overheard conversations on the field line—an entry level job at Angola State Penitentiary where prison farm laborers make about eight cents an hour.

LISTEN: C.D.Wright-Overheard in the Field Line

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“IN LOUISIANA EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE A COSTUME…”

Deborah photographed the women at their Mardi Gras celebration and at the Halloween haunted house at at San Gabriel women’s prison. “There were all of these traditional Louisiana costumes and archetypes,” said Deborah. “Alligator Girl, Rat Face. They run this haunted house in the gymnasium. There’s the snake room, the bird room, the bat room. And there’s the execution chamber where one inmate sits in an electric chair, and the other inmate  is the executioner, and she throws a switch, and this strobe light goes on behind the head of the woman that’s supposedly being executed, and that woman starts jumping around. There’s a lot of black humor there.”

The women make their costumes out of sheets, table clothes and available materials. “The winning costumes were big striped uniforms,” said CD Wright. “Uniforms with big tall Dr. Seuss like striped hats. They were made from uniforms of the women in maximum security who could not participate in either Halloween or Mardi Gras. So those were made in their honor.”

“In Louisiana, everything feels like a costume,” said CD Wright. “The inmates had different uniforms for all of the different positions in the prison. The prisoners were identified by their work detail uniforms. People in culinary arts wore big baker hats and white jackets.”

“This man who is scarred so badly, we heard that his brother threw a tire over his head and set it on fire,” explained CD Wright. “He was so dignified. He was beautiful, really. He had green eyes. He always looked absolutely, directly at the camera. I found him very striking. Not just because he was so scarred, but because of the dignity he brought to his very disfigured face.”

The photographs are done on aluminum photographic plates reminiscent of tintypes. The aluminum is treated with gelatin silver as you would treat a canvas with gesso before you paint on it. Deborah makes paper copies of the aluminum plates for the prisoners. They are not allowed to have sharp metal objects. The photographs are small, only a little larger than a postcard. “I wanted to preserve the intimacy of these very formal photographs,” Deborah said.

THEY MADE THEMSELVES SO VULNERABLE TO ME

At Angola where 90 percent of the men that go there, die there, it was very sober. There was no clowning around. It was a very formal. The way they would pose themselves was very sort of nineteenth century.

“For the most part they presented themselves as they wanted to be presented, looking out,” said CD Wright.  It as was all voluntary. She returned a portion of the funds that she received from selling the plates which are on aluminum to the prisoners fund. With which they buy popcorn and books and undershirts and personal items.

Deborah made prints for each person she photographed. She returned 25,000 prints to inmates.

At one point Deborah was walking down the block at Angola, in the middle of the 18,000-acre prison, near one of the dormitories there.    And a voice behind her said, “You’ve been to the women’s prison at St. Gabriel, haven’t you?”  And she said, “Now how would you know that?”  And the man said, “Because I sent my girlfriend a picture you took of me, and she sent me one back just like it.”  “So  there were these little images are flying between the prisons,” said Deborah, ” and, I thought that’s what it was all about.”

“They made themselves so vulnerable to me and it’s not often that you have an encounter like that. I know a lot of it was that they were actually posing for the people that they loved, their husbands, their wives, their children.”

“There was a woman who asked to be photographed,” said Deborah. “She said ‘I’ve been here 15 years. I’m down for 99 years. I have 19 children. My children haven’t spoken to me since I came to prison. Perhaps if I had some photographs I could send them it would soften their hearts to me.’ A few months later she said, ‘Four of my children came to visit me. The baby came and he’s nineteen. He was five years old when I came to prison.'”

SOMETHING MY MOTHER WOULD HAVE DONE

“For me,” said Deborah. “It became this project about the importance of the personal photograph, and what that little slip of paper, or piece of tin can mean to a person.”

“I think this project is the kind of thing my mother would have done,” said Deborah. “She had this way of looking right through the veneer, right into people. She could see the bottom in people. She liked to photograph her family, the food on your plate, you brushing your teeth. She photographed what she loved and that’s what she loved.”

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How We Found this Story

We have been thinking about this girls series for a long time, even while we were in the middle of the Hidden Kitchens project. One of our central methods is to say everything out loud, tell everyone we know and don’t know about what it is we’re working on and looking for. We have a good nose for stories, but sometimes the people we know have an even better one. This story, “Deborah Luster: One Big Self” came to us because one night writer Michael Ondaatje and his wife, writer Linda Spalding were asking what new story we were working on. We described a new project we were just beginning to imagine about the secret life of girls around the world. Michael jumped in, “One Big Self. You have to see it. You have to know about Deborah Luster and her photographs and her collaboration with her C.D. Wright, the poet. They call it “One Big Self.” He told us Deborah’s story and we were mesmerized.

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“AMERICA IS A THEME PARK OF VIOLENCE…” C. D. Wright

Poet CD Wright was a long-time friend and colleague of Deborah Luster who collaborated with her on One Big Self. Here are some excerpts from her interview.

Can you talk about your collaboration with Deborah Luster?

Deborah and I met at the University of Arkansas. I was a teaching assistant and she was a senior undergraduate, so we’ve known each other for some time. We have similar sensibilities, the same kind of edgy sense of humor and the same sort of political orientation. And we have complimentary aesthetics. We’ve worked on several projects together. Both photographers and poets are used to working in solitude so it’s sometimes testing to try to work out certain visions, but our visions are actually very compatible.

This project was initiated by Deborah who is working out a long term relationship to violence which began with her mother’s murder. She’s trying to include every point of view. This is a very sympathetic project for someone who is a survivor of such a violent act. The decision from the beginning was to photograph inmates in their whole selves, their better selves.

The title of the project comes from a sentence by Terrence Malik: “Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody’s a part of–all faces of the same man: one big self.”

The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept that — whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily aside — the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, to see prisoners among others, as they elect to be seen. In “their larger selves.”

LISTEN: Wright talks about writing text for One Big Self

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What significance do you feel these photographs had for the inmates?

In the maximum security prison, the mirrors are stainless steel, so there’s a kind of warp—your reflection is not that clear. So many of these inmates don’t see themselves for years at a stretch, they don’t see the real delineation of their faces. And time passes. I think that many of them are not aware of the details of their physical changes.

The last photograph for many of these prisoners is their mug shot. In Deborah’s photos prisoners presented themselves as they wanted to be presented, looking out. Dressed in costume, holding up a sign, a photo or something they cared about.

Family portraiture, is a big tradition in the south, so these photographs were another opportunity to be included in that tradition. It was important that they were posed and dignified pictures. We tried very hard not to idealize people there; most of them were not there for spitting on the sidewalk, they had done really bad things. Most of them had brought some harm of some kind to somebody else.

LISTEN: Wright reads from One Big Self

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MORE POEMS FROM ONE BIG SELF:

If I were you:

 

Screw up today, and it’s solitary, Sister Woman, the padded dress with the food log to gnaw on.  This is where you enter the eye of the far.  The air is foul.  The dirt is gumbo.  Avoid all physical contact.  Come nightfall the bugs will carry you off.  I don’t have a clue, do I?

_______________________

they sit on the slab walk, smoke and talk

They pass a stuffed bunny from hand to hand

for their turn in front of the camera

The church ladies are out on soul patrol

they’ve got ditty bags for the prisoners

Poster:  Black History, women’s prison

The blacker the college

The sweeter the knowledge

Navy is housekeeping

Khaki is for peer tutor

 

The search for Molly is forty-five days old

 

If you were a felon

You’d be home now

Cradle my head Sister

until the last rivet of grief is secure

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One Big Self was produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva in collaboration with Nathan Dalton and mixed by Jim McKee.

We’d like to thank our dear friends and sisters in collaboration – C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster. We’d also like to thank Jack Woody of Twelve Trees press, Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding for leading us to this story, Randy Fertel for his generous heart and support, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the arts for their support of Hidden World of Girls.

C.D. Wright’s latest book is a collection of essays published in January 2016. It’s called The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. Published by Copper Canyon Press.

RADIOTOPIA:
Fugitive Waves is produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell.
We’re part of Radiotopia from PRX – a collective of the best story-driven, creative cutting edge radio shows on earth.

From all of us at Radiotopia, many thanks for listening, sharing these programs with your friends and supporting this new experiment in supporting storytelling.

We’d like to thank the many of you who have donated to Radiotopia and The Kitchens Sisters, especially designer and illustrator Jez Burrows, whose most recent project Dictionary Stories is a collection of very short stories entirely composed from example sentences from the dictionary. Find it at dictionarystories.com.

Notes from The Kitchen Sisterhood

Dear Friends, Sometimes we find the story. Sometimes the story finds us. Here are some projects, events, and collaborations our friends and colleagues are taking on that we want you to know about. Here’s to a creative and disruptive Fall,     Davia & Nikki Projects we’re supporting: Prison Yoga Project: A volunteer-run Hatha Yoga Program in San Quentin working towards restorative justice. Indiegogo. Omnivore Salt Limone: Forger and Forager Angelo Garro introduces another small Sicilian miracle. Kickstarter. Feed Your People: Big Batch cooking for your community. Kickstarter. Books we’re reading: Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio by Jessica Abel Almost Her: The Strange Dilemma of being Nearly Famous by Caroline Paul A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation by Randy Fertel Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges by Stephen Berry Events we’re attending (or wish we were): Laurie Anderson’s Habeas Corpus installation at Park Avenue Armory (Oct 2-4)  “Gradually, the truth about Guantánamo has come out. Most of them knew less about Al Qaeda than I did. They were taxi drivers, students, photographers, journalists, and goat herders.” Terra Madre Youth: A gathering of young farmers, artisans, nomads, indigenous peoples on hunger and the future of food at The World Expo in Milan (Oct 3-6) Zen Hospice Project’s benefit, One Night One Heart “Story + Spirit” – Terra Gallery, SF (Oct 7) Smithsonian Food History Weekend, Washington DC (Oct 22-24) Center for Documentary Studies 25th Anniversary Celebration – Duke Univ, Durham (Nov 20-22) Films we hope you see: Ixcanul (“Volcano”), directed by Jayro Bustamante. A beautiful, harrowing story on a coffee plantation in Guatemala Taxi by Iranian director Jafar Panahi Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron, with Carey Mulligan & Meryl Streep. The story of the women’s voting rights movement in England. Best of Enemies: Buckley vs Vidal. Two men, ten debates. Directed by Morgan Neville & Robert Gordon Heart of a Dog, directed by Laurie Anderson What we’re listening to: “Hamilton” the cast recording of the Broadway musical, on NPR Music’s First Listen. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” Passerby by Luluc (on tour now) 69 Love Songs by Magnetic Fields Hat’s Off: Alice Waters receives the National Humanities Medal from President Obama along with Larry McMurtry, Annie Dillard, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others. Podcasts we’re producing: Fugitive Waves / Episode 31: Waiting for Joe DiMaggio Wall Street: San Quentin’s Stock Market Wizard The Secret and Not So Secret Life of Theresa Sparks Don’t miss a single episode. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher | RSS