Cassondra Levert, St. Gabriel, Louisiana 2 - 2001

Here's Deborah Luster’s tintype of Cassondra Levert, probably made with a large format camera. I’m imagining Luster working in the darkroom, hunched over trays of developer, carefully coaxing the image into being. There’s something so immediate and present about this photo. Maybe it's the way Cassondra looks directly out at us. She is wearing a sash, dress, and flower crown – I wonder what the occasion was? I feel like I can sense her, what she might have been thinking, her inner life. I imagine the slow, deliberate process of making a tintype, each step requiring careful attention and technical skill. And I wonder about the collaboration between the photographer and the sitter. What’s it like to be photographed? The process of making art is often a dance between intention and accident, control and surrender, pushing the limits of what’s possible. Just like life, huh?