Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish photographs contemporary and historic homicide sites in New Orleans. The project approaches the city through places where a life has been lost, making location a means of thinking about absence. Luster’s second book follows One Big Self and continues her attention to loss and remembrance, this time through an archive of sites rather than a collection centered on individual portraits.

The photographs use a circular, or tondo, format. A circle sets a distinct boundary around the view, bringing a particular portion of the city into focus. The surrounding life of New Orleans remains part of the project’s context: its architecture, material surroundings, cultural practices and diverse population. Luster’s account connects these elements to the presence of violence, treating life and death as conditions that coexist and influence one another within the same city.

Twin Palms published the oversized hardcover in December 2010. It contains 64 pages and 30 duotone plates, with a 17-by-14-inch format. The combination of a large page and a circular photograph gives the reader a specific way of encountering each location. The physical book provides room to return to a site in the sequence and to consider how one image relates to the others.

The work invites a form of looking in which what is no longer visible matters as much as what can be seen. A location persists after an event, while its meaning changes through knowledge of what happened there. Reading the book can therefore involve moving between the appearance of a place and the memory attached to it. The archive gives these sites a shared context without making their losses interchangeable.