One Big Self: An Investigation

Inspired by visits inside Louisiana state prisons - where MacArthur Fellow C. D. Wright accompanied portrait photographer Deborah Luster - One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the corrosive toll of protracted confinement. It is a mixture of distinct voices, epistles, fragments from an antique and aggressively pious board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and inventories of things - from baby teeth to chigger bites. As Wright proposes in her introduction: "Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time."