I love New Orleans
I love New Orleans
I was born and grew up with my family in San Diego, and I suppose I felt somewhat as if it was home as a pre-adolescent youngster (during the 1950's), and during the early sixties I ran the beaches as a surfer...but other than that I never really had the emotional sensation of "home" in San Diego. San Diego had somewhat of an inferiority complex--a parochial second city to Los Angeles (they actually put up signs everywhere stating, "San Diego, Americas Finest City"). As I grew older, the obvious corruption that no one would admit, and the lousy path of San Diego gentrification and the downtown redevelopment started to bug me. And there is an underlying pervasive moral conservatism that seems to infect even the counterculture...the hippies, the punk rockers, etc. Over the years I'd lived in most of the San Diego neighborhoods, with my final five years in an interesting downtown hotel...but with downtown San Diego redevelopment underway, I started to realize that my next move would probably be a big one, most likely to Tijuana. There was nowhere cool left in San Diego, and after 38 years it was clear that the city did not like me, and I did not like it. Since moving, I sometimes explain it as being popped out of San Diego like a pimple...but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I had a large record collection, and was realizing that ALL my favorite music was from New Orleans. A jealous former boyfriend of my new serious girlfriend was the catalyst, and the two of us crazily moved to New Orleans with a few posessions in a driveaway car. Neither of us had been anywhere in the south prior to the move (I'd never been further east than Arizona) so we had no idea what New Orleans would be like other than what we'd read in a few guidebooks in the San Diego library. To our surprise, we arrived just days before Mardi Gras, so we had the most festive of introductions to our new city. And New Orleans is just so damn beautiful, and such a joyous city, and I just loved it from the very beginning. It is old, and historic, and authentic, and poignant. And it has a spirit, a shared identity and a sense of community that goes deeper than any racial or religious or cultural divisions. We don't tolerate eccentricity here in New Orleans--we celebrate eccentricity...perhaps to a fault. Outsiders do not understand why New Orleanians seem to have such a profound connection to their city, and I'm just trying to explain it in a few quick sentences. There is a shared "state of mind" that comes from living here. Once, after a necessary visit to San Diego for family business, the plane landed at the New Orleans airport, and the door opened to a giant mid-August sweat-ball of heat and humidity...and to me it felt like a big wet kiss.
Photographically, it changed me to be here. I had primarily photographed people in the San Diego counterculture. I'd get an unusual and valued photo every now and then at a party...but there were no actual events (other than Halloween) in which we could participate. Compare that to the rich photographic opportunites on Mardi Gras day (and thats just the big one...there are numerous festivities in New Orleans all year long...parades and other events that outsiders never hear about). How do I resolve the ease of finding great subject matter with the work I'd already done...is a photographer just the guy who has access? Or is there some underlying art to it regardless of the subject matter?
When asked, I try to explain and resolve the fact that my birthplace is San Diego...and I sometimes say, "the stork made a mistake...I was REALLY born in New Orleans".
