New Orleans - March 3-6, 2014
I’d hardly returned from south Florida when it was time to go to New Orleans for the annual conference of the Southern Communication Association. I first visited New Orleans in 1988, and it immediately became one of my favorite cities. It’s a city devoted to sybaritic pleasures, known for both food and sex. That it sits below sea level, surrounded by water--the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain--always threatened, gives the city a precarious feel that stands in stark contrast to the steadfast durability of the historic buildings housing some of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the US. New Orleans does not gleam; there’s a layer of decay that covers everything, a gentle desuetude--paint peels and fades; storm shutters sag. New Orleans is a jazz funeral march, with its bright, upbeat tempos and its dirges; New Orleans is the darkness of hauntings and Voodoo and the garish neon of Bourbon Street. Death and life, New Orleans seems to beckon us to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.”
This was my second trip to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. In the French Quarter it is as if nothing happened.
New Orleans, especially the French Quarter and the Garden District, is one of the most photogenic cities in the US, but I have now been there so many times, always with camera, that I have taken all the New Orleans photos--the wrought iron balconies, the Mardi Gras masks--so I take fewer and fewer photos each visit now. There’s always something, though, to strike the eye and arrest the imagination.
Click here for additional photos of this trip to New Orleans. To view as a slideshow, double click the first photo, then use the navigation arrows at the top of the page to scroll through.
