Spirit of New Orleans, by Bruce Keyes (B.K. Publishing)
by: Arin Black | posted: May 4, 2009
In his illuminating forward to Spirit of New Orleans (B.K. Publishing), Richard D. Zakia explains that photographer Bruce Keyes’ pictures of New Orleans function as an icon for the city. Whether an icon or a love poem, the images presented in Spirit of New Orleans deserve a closer look.
Over the course of three decades, photographer Bruce Keyes perfected the art of being in the right place at the right time. The book is divided up into sections based on geography or occasion, allowing the reader to stop in a space or time and get lost. The images work as a kind of time capsule—on one page, a young street dancer poses opposite his mirror image many years older—and the book formats them in such a way as to feel like a visit to a gallery, with one moment bleeding into another. The supremely tonal compositions don’t pop from the page; they aren’t advertisements for art. They aren’t trying to be that. Instead, the effect is subtle and the viewer finds herself suddenly struck by a look or gesture.
Reminiscent of Walker Evans’ Americana and even more so of early 20th-century photographer Eugène Auguste Atget’s pictures of Paris, Keyes’ photographs take the reader into a singular moment in time and manage to capture portraits that embody New Orleans whilst shaking off the grime and seediness that life in the Crescent City sometimes serves up. The resulting portraits are nostalgic, innocent, imbued with a kind of joyous probity, and they act as homage to the city and to the traditions and peoples that make it unique. Working exclusively in black and white, Keyes finds the angles in everyday moments without intruding upon them: an enormous elderly man sits and eats a watermelon in the French Market; children in suits wait on the street corner for their chance to busk for change; a second line saunters past the camera’s lens.
The images are iconic without becoming clichés. Jazz funerals and Mardi Gras parades; sound, sass, and bluster—it’s a New Orleans we’ve all seen before, but not quite like this. The photos seemed stripped down to their honest essence, kept free from any filters, and subsequently, they take on both an individual and cumulative meaning. I want to live in this New Orleans, to know these people, and sometimes I do—on those perfect sunny days when I chance upon a street artist, the first time I heard Mr. Okra peddling his wares from his battered pickup truck (“I have strawberries. I have cantaloupes…”), eating the season’s first batch of crawfish. It’s the sweet decay, the slow motion, the willingness to stop and let joy seep in, that lets New Orleans take hold and not let go, and it’s present on every page of the book.
