Soul searching Photographs and poetry illuminate One Big Self:Prisoners of Louisiana BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Louisiana-based photographer Deborah Luster and Rhode Island poet C.D. Wright first met in their home state of Arkansas in the early ’80s. Since then, they have worked together on several multimedia projects, and during their most recent collaboration, they visited three prisons in eastern Louisiana — a minimum security site in Transylvania, a women’s prison in St. Gabriel, and the notorious maximum security prison at Angola. Luster’s portraits of prisoners and Wright’s plainspoken verse about their lives create a powerful picture of the all-but-ignored world of incarcerated people in this country, in their 2003 book One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana and in the show of the same name, at the Bell Gallery. The title comes from Terrence Malick’s film, The Thin Red Line: "Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody’s a part of — all faces of the same man: one big self."

Wright and Luster don’t present this work as a critique of the US or Louisiana penal system, though some of the numbers Luster mentioned in her gallery talk on April 14 speak for themselves. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the free world; Louisiana has the highest in the US. Most of the men in Louisiana prisons have less than nine years of education; 39 percent of the women have less than six. Of the 5000 men at Angola, 78 percent are African-American, and 40 percent are first offenders.

Portions of Wright’s book-length poem are screened onto the gallery walls, and you can hear other sections read by Wright when you lift the receiver of one of the three telephones posted around the exhibit. The more than 60 5x4-inch photographs are framed versions of the ones Luster printed onto aluminum plates. In addition, 250 plates, with prisoner info etched on the backs, are in the drawers of a black metal cabinet, so visitors can take them out and examine them up close; the plates are for sale, with a part of the proceeds going to an inmate welfare fund.

The black-and-white photographs are formal and old-fashioned, their rounded edges and slight yellow tinge reminiscent of early tintypes. Each prisoner who volunteered to be photographed received 10 to 15 wallet-sized prints, which they shared with family members and loved ones. Some were posed by the photographer and some by the subjects themselves. The one of "Hustleman" — chosen for the exhibit’s announcement card and as the book’s opening image — shows a young man with a very muscular bare chest, hands hanging at his sides, head bowed in a submissive, contrite gesture. He posed himself in just that way, Luster emphasized.

Yet, of the thousands of photos she shot (25,000 prints returned to inmates), she was obviously making some trenchant choices: how tight a focus she wanted (head, full body, torso, cropped at the knees); body positions (sitting, standing, boxing stance); with or without costumes or accessories (boxing gloves, sombreros, chef’s hats); profile or straight-on; against a black velvet backdrop, in a cotton field, or in a vegetable patch.

You get glimpses of these prisoners’ lives from the place and the dress in the photos: working the huge farm at Angola, dragging cloth shoulder sacks through the cotton fields; wide boxing belts, proudly worn or displayed; cowboy hats, chaps and boots, with wide vertical-striped shirts for the annual Angola Rodeo; sombreros against the punishing sun in the vegetable gardens; chef’s hats and coats in the culinary arts program at the women’s prison; and evocative costumes for Halloween, Mardi Gras, and Easter, also taken at the women’s prison.

Both men and women have tattoos they wanted photographed — "Hell!!" and "Real Men Eat Pussy" (those on the body of a young man whose nickname is "Smurf"); "mo dollars, mo problems"; "Foolish." The most striking are the close-up on the face of a man holding his lip out to show "Fuck You" inside it and the forearm of a woman who has a tattoo of her murdered sister on it.

Some prisoners’ faces are marked by the past violence in their lives. Christina Kolozvari’s eyes might have been repeatedly blackened; there’s a large scar under one. Her mild expression and the slight hunch of her shoulders contrasts with the toughness of the tattoos on her biceps. "Bolottie’s" face and neck show horrible burn scars (from a brother who "necklaced" him, explained Luster), but his direct gaze and neatly corn-rowed hair attest to his intact sense of self.

Luster has shots of male or female siblings posed together, doing time together. Family looms large in these portraits, such as in a photo of a man’s arm, his son’s photo in his hand. One woman hugs a young girl (her face out of focus); another bares her huge pregnant belly, a look of "Yeah? So?" in her eyes. In other prisoners’ eyes or posture you can read gentleness or resignation, pride or arrogance and, in a few, a wild-eyed madness that made me check their sentence — their crimes are not given.

It was Luster’s childhood attachment to a box of family photos and the contract killing of her mother in 1988 that led her into photography and eventually to this prison project. It is her attention to detail and her understanding of the emotional layers in these photos that makes them glow with the personhood of their subjects.

"You don’t do this for purposes of enlightening the world," Luster stressed, "but because you couldn’t help it."

In so doing, however, she has enlightened us all.