A Diane Arbus: Photographs

The Image Wrought:
Historical Photographic Approaches in the Digital Age

One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana

November 28, 2007 - February 24, 2008

Diane Arbus: Photographs
Featuring a selection of rare, vintage prints by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, the exhibition offers an exceptional opportunity to see Arbus’s full range of achievement from the start of her career in 1956 to the end of her life in 1971. The show is drawn from the largest private collection of Arbus’s work and includes a suite of photographs never before shown to the public. On view are such iconic masterpieces as Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C. 1963 and seldom seen works including Fire Eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, N.J. 1956.

The Image Wrought:
Historical Photographic Approaches
in the Digital Age
Organized by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, examines the seeming paradox of contemporary photographers embracing archaic photographic practices in today’s digital age. the show provides a singular opportunity to view contemporary images alongside vintage examples of their nineteenth-century predecessors. Past and present come together to offer a unique perspective on this important moment in the history of photography.


Funding provided in part by the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust.

One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana
Between 1998 and 2002 photographer Deborah Luster, along with poet C.D. Wright, set out to create an authentic document of Louisiana's prison population through image and text—a document to ward off forgetting, an opportunity for the inmates to present themselves as they would be seen, bringing what they own or borrow or use: work tools, objects of their making, messages of their choosing, their bodies, themselves. The resulting collection of small amber-toned prints on aluminum, both framed and placed loosely in drawers for viewers to examine, is a composite of universal and particular realities that reflects upon private loss, individual lives, language, public policy and institutions, and societal violence.


Funding provided in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Gallery Hours
Tues - Sunday 12 - 5 pm, closed on Mondays 

Admission is free.

top to bottom: Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. 1967, Copyright (c) 1969 The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC; Thomas Annan, Princes Street, from King Street, 1868, Carbon print; Richard McCowan, [Cobblestones at Tower of London], ca. 1998. Carbo print; Deborah Luster, Jenar Jury - St. Gabriel, Louisiana, 2000, Silver emulsion on prepared aluminum