Angola, Louisiana 18 - 1999

Deborah Luster made this arresting portrait, Angola, Louisiana, using a photographic process called tintype, which dates to the 19th century. Instead of a paper print, the image is fixed directly onto an enameled metal plate, creating a unique object with its own material presence. Luster is drawn to historical techniques like tintype in part for their directness. The subject is present in the studio with her, and the resulting artifact has an unmediated quality. In this case, the sitter is an inmate at Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. He holds a framed photograph of his family, in poignant contrast to his own incarceration. Luster's work asks us to consider the human cost of incarceration, the labor of image-making, and the social context in which the photograph was created. The tintype becomes a medium for conveying the weight and texture of lived experience, a reminder that art, like life, is a process of making and unmaking.