Sunset Over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, Louisiana | June 2006
When I first moved back to New Orleans after Katrina in June 2006, I drove up to Lake Pontchartrain and stood on the levee at UNO so I could see out around me. Behind me as I took the picture above were hundred of FEMA Trailers, seemingly empty, in the parking lot of the UNO Lakefront Arena. I spent two years in the city after the storm, and often I had to make it my purpose to find beauty amid the destruction. This was one of those moments.
Broken Jesus (left) and St. Mary’s Cathedral (right) in Uptown, New Orleans | August 2006
The two photos above are easily among my favorite from Uptown New Orleans. I went one afternoon with a cussing, smoking, hippie pastor whose eye for dirty things makes him a great artist, if not one of my more eclectic friends. He introduced me to the courtyard inside the Francis Xavier Seelos Center, which I returned to several times before leaving the city.
The Greenwood Cemetery near First Baptist Church of New Orleans on Canal Street in Mid-City… My friend Katie and I grabbed breakfast at this gas-station dive of a cafe Dolly’s Deli very early on a cold, wet October morning before heading across the street to take photos in the cemetery. As I’m sure you know, they bury their dead above ground in New Orleans (and most of lower Louisiana) because caskets tend to pop up out of the ground like corks when it floods.
Greenwood Cemetery in Mid City, New Orleans | October 2006
St. Louis at Decatur in the French Quarter, New Orleans | December 2006
One misty December morning I got up while it was still dark and drove down to the French Quarter. By the time I got there the sun was barely lighting the sky. As I walked down Decatur Street I saw this man standing on the corner. There’s something great about the French Quarter in the morning; watching the residents out jogging and walking their dogs; the workers driving in for a long day of entertaining the tourists. It’s like sneaking a peak behind the curtain on Broadway as the people prepare to put on a show for the masses. Or, at least for a few moments, that’s how it felt.