“Review: Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye,” Gambit
What really qualifies as news? A mass shooting at a school understandably generates widespread national outrage, yet the rampant killings in our inner city — or any American inner city — are too routine to garner headlines. The philosopher Hannah Arendt once referred to Nazi genocide as “the banality of evil” for the bureaucratic way it was enacted, but Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye photographs of local murder scenes (now on display at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art) exemplify what might be called the “ordinariness” of evil: The most startling thing about them is how utterly unremarkable they are. Only the photographs’ circular compositions differentiate these scenes from others that go unnoticed on any given day.