Deborah Luster’s documentary photographs impart the community, culture and landscape of the South. Working with medium format cameras, she presents the rituals of daily life, the life forces in objects and the inner spirits of her subjects. As poet C.D. Wright describes, “She offers no theory, adheres to none; none stick back. She studies compulsively and applies in the particular, what works then and there.”
Send It On Down is a collection of the artist’s early work, primarily drawn from two projects. The Lost Roads Project was begun in 1990 in collaboration with poet C.D. Wright. Black and white photographs document the ceremony of Sunday church services; the conventions of local fishing, boat building and farming industries; and the writers, street magicians and other eccentric personalities of the local community. These images along with literary works were published in The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press, 1994). Send It On Down also contains work from The Rosesucker Retablos (with poems by C.D. Wright).
