New Orleans Dreaming

New Orleans Dreaming

USA | Sunday, October 10, 2010 | 5 photos

New Orleans is filled with life. The city bursts with music and art, with tourists – awestruck, behind their cynicism - and the grifters who make a living posing for their pictures and playing to their dreams.

Behind the trappings of the French Quarter, New Orleans lies crying, buildings crumbling, streets deserted, communities in ruins.

You can hear it, in a quiet moment, in the plaintive notes of a lone busker's clarinet. It's in the smell wafting from the gutters - of garlic, bourbon, vomit and urine - in the urgent steps of families hurrying back to their hotels, the careful, measured steps of the late night crowd on Bourbon Street, and in the lined faces of the locals, for whom there is no room on the street car back to the darker side of town.

Yet, somehow, there is hope. Somehow there is joy, and generosity and wonder. The racial divide, the crippling poverty, injustices past and present, all melt away when the Saints score a touchdown, when the sun sets on the Mississippi and children dance in the streets. In New Orleans, the show goes on - and it is beautiful.

My interest in photography lies in finding the human story behind the images. I love to travel, searching for those individual stories that make community histories accessible; exploring social, economic and political paradigms in the hope of challenging our preconceptions of one another and sweetening the visual richness of life.