[flickr id=”6346866099″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]

This week we had yet another visiting artist. This time it was Deborah Luster, who currently has work on display in the Crime Unseen show that is up at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

As a side note, Columbia College Chicago’s “Lectures in Photography” series is one of the best around. This semester we have had three artists come. And they’re not just local artists either; these were three artists with extremely long resumes (Roger Ballen, John Gossage, and Deborah Luster). As a bonus to the fact that they come and talk about their work, they also come into the classrooms. If you are an undergraduate, they come in and lecture to you; it’s usually something to do with their own work. If you are a graduate student, you have the chance to show them your work during class and hear what they  think about it and any suggestions that they might have for the work. Usually, while they are not specifically teachers, they have insights into the work (especially the formal, compositional aspects) that are usually not fully talked about in critique.

Deborah Luster’s lecture on Thursday night was really interesting. She talked about the evolution of her work over the last decade or so, and it was insightful to see the change in the work. It is also always refreshing to hear a successful artist talk about having the same struggles that you as a student are having. It reinforces the idea that all artists deal with the same sort of problems and the successful ones are the ones who find ways to navigate around or through those problems, usually with the work being better because of them.

[flickr id=”6347616520″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]

Of her two bodies of work that she showed, I found the second (which is the one on display) to be the more interesting. The premise of the work is murders that happened in the city of New Orleans. For many of the images, she photographs where murders have taken place, but where the evidence of those murders has faded and they have returned to looking like “normal” places. With each image, she includes the names and ages of those murdered and the method.

[flickr id=”6347616590″ thumbnail=”medium_640″ overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]

One of the interesting aspects of this work was the planning. I am always fascinated by planning that goes into work because of the amount of planning and thinking I do about my own work before I shoot it. If find it interesting that so many of the artists we think of as going out and “finding” the images they shoot actually have a lot of planning that goes into those images. For Luster, much of that planning revolves around researching murders ( exhaustive and morbid research that she commented has taken it’s toll on her) in the area around where she lives, mapping out those locations and then photographing them. This was maybe the nicest little tidbit of the work for me.

[flickr id=”6347616650″ thumbnail=”medium” overlay=”true” size=”medium” group=”” align=”none”]

Then on Friday she was in Grad Seminar to look at work and answer questions about her own. It was yet another interesting day as a grad student here at Columbia.