New Orleans Mythology
“Ancient, by American standards isn’t very old. Two or three hundreds years at most….and the abandoned mills and factories are no more than sixty years old. But I think of New Orleans, that city mired in time, where a whole religion evolved in less than two hundred years — a slapdash recipe concocted of one part Haitian graveyard dust, one part juju from the African bush, a jigger of holy communion wine, and a dash of swamp miasma. Magic happens when and where it wants to.”
In New Orleans, truth and fabrication is lore.
Many years of reading history books, first hand accounts of events that have happened here have produced a thought that there’s a universal language, a testament reminiscent of religious parables
New Orleans is sacrosanct and has existed on the border of ruin and
It has always been dark times for New Orleans. The land where the city birthed is a catch basin for all of the detritus and muck that spills off from the thousands of tributaries that flow into the Mississippi River. It’s no wonder the city attracts vagabonds, artists, miscreants, grifters and free spirits; people who find nowhere else to belong. But it has never been a safe place to live. Disease, weather, violence, war and corruption is the fulcrum upon which the balance of the city’s history teeters. It’s also joy, however that people find among the company of neighbors and outsiders from which art and tradition is made. This is the primordial soup for America of African, Italian, German, French, Irish, Spanish, Vietnamese, English cultures that coalesced and broke ground, often hating each other along the way. This may not sound like a love letter to the city but it is. It’s a treasure despite its flaws and it won’t be around forever, a reality most of us are aware. Maybe we have 100 years left. Maybe 200 if we’re lucky but one day, New Orleans will be gone. It’ll be a legend of Atlantis and Sodom, uniquely American.
In a short time of just over three hundred years, the city has produced religion, music, vampires, red light districts, ruins, countless epidemics, racial strife, caste systems, cuisine, … It’s where American culture begins and where over half of every waterway in the continental United States eventually drains. It is wet, swampy and paradoxically one of the most and least likely places for magic to happen.
The prints are available now to help fund this costly project so that I can hire models, produce sets and book studio time to make this passion project a reality.
This project will evoke the city’s history rather than relate a literal translation.
