What’s Not to Celebrate?
New Orleans, LA 2014-2018
-text below gallery-
What’s Not to Celebrate?
Attempting to completely wrap one’s mind around all that is the city of New Orleans is just about futile. When having to explain the city, a common response of the populous, both native and transplant alike, with both good and bad connotation is “That’s New Orleans.” And it is a fair answer for all of its spectacle, dysfunction, and peculiarity. Just saying the name of the city evokes so much, that in reality this may be the only reasonable explanation for the anomaly that is the city. “That’s New Orleans.”
As much as I love the city, I perpetually felt like a foreigner during the time I lived there and even if I lived in New Orleans for a century, I don’t know if that would ever change. I’ve heard this is often how people from New Orleans feel when they move just about anywhere else. It adds up to me. But like many other outsiders who throughout its history have spent a healthy stretch of time in the city, it dominated the substance and focus of my artistic work to the point that it became haunting.
I spent a lot of time thinking about New Orleans while I lived there: researching, learning and experiencing as much as I could to feed my fascination and attempt to make sense of the city. But the knowledge I acquired usually left my grasp of and personal connection to the city just as distant. Critical thinking didn’t seem to get me any closer to feeling like I really understood New Orleans. In the end, I feel perhaps the times I came closest to understanding New Orleans were always through undiscerning moments of emotion rather than rationalization. And that adds up too.
Eddie Bo, celebrated musician and native son, has a quote about New Orleans attributed to him that I love: “If you smoke a cigarette, they’ll have a parade for it. Then if you die from the cigarette, they’ll be a parade for that, too.” On many levels, the quote sums up the spirit of a city beyond reasonable comprehension. The title of this photo series is inspired by this quote and the underlying life force of New Orleans, because, after all, “What’s not to celebrate?”
-more photographic collections on New Orleans-