New Orleans is a city that holds memory in its bones.
It's not a place I ever thought I would go to, yet I'm writing this blog a few weeks before my fourth visit to the Crescent City.
I've taken a camera to any place I've traveled to my whole life, but my first visit to New Orleans—five years after Katrina—felt different. I brought my 35mm Canon AE-1 and rolls of Lomo 100 Color film, not knowing then that this trip would begin my understanding of photography as my art.
An artist I met took me to the 9th Ward, where I documented what remained: murals stretched across houses that still stood, shotgun homes with flood lines, abandoned lots where nature had started to reclaim what was left behind, and the steady signs of progress. Murals stretched across houses that still stood. The shoot was quiet—skeletons of houses, abandoned structures, shotgun homes still lived in, and chickens roaming freely in overgrown yards.
Cemeteries have always been one of my favorite places to shoot, and New Orleans has some of the most striking in the world. The above-ground tombs, weathered statues, and rusted gates felt like a continuation of the city’s layered history, its ability to hold memory in its bones. I lost myself in the angles, the textures, and the light moving through the spaces between stone and sky.
I’ve taken thousands of images since then, but I don’t think I’ve spent as much time with any of them as I have with the ones from that first trip. I studied them, lived with them, and learned from them. I used some of these images in my first group shows in New York and Richmond, VA. They were more than photographs—they were proof of a moment that shaped me.
I’ve come a long way since that first trip—both as an artist and as a person. Later this month, I’ll return to New Orleans, and I wonder how I’ll see the city now. More than that, I wonder how it will see me.
Comments