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NYC: Seeing Angola - Panel Discussion

  • Aperture Gallery and Bookstore 547 West 27th Street NYC USA (map)
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Panelists: Deborah Luster, Zachary Lazar, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormic

Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. She joined the Museums in 2017. She is currently at work on the upcoming exhibition James Baldwin’s America. Forthcoming publications include a book on Civil War–era photography, an essay on photography and incarceration, and an article on class and labor in nineteenth-century American photography. She is the coeditor of Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (2016). She received her MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts and PhD from Harvard University.

Deborah Luster is best known for her long-term documentary series One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana(with poet C. D. Wright; 1998–2003), a photographic archive of prisoner portraits from three Louisiana prisons, including the state penitentiary at Angola, and Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish(2008–11), an archive of cityscapes documenting locations in New Orleans where homicides have been committed. Both monographs were published by Twin Palms Publishing (in 2003 and 2011). Luster’s awards include a 2018 Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowship, a 2016 Robert Gardner Fellowship from the Peabody Museum, and a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Image: Deborah Luster, Layla “Roach” Roberts (Inquisitor), 2012-13; Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York