New Orleans: A Beloved City
Photographs by Michael A. Smith
April 28 through June 25, 2006
Annex Gallery

A reception for this exhibit will be held on Friday, May 5, 2006 at 8 p.m. as part of the 2006 Environmental Art Fair.

In 1984, Michael A. Smith was asked by John Lawrence, Curator of Photographs at The Historic New Orleans Collection, a private foundation and museum based in the French Quarter, to photograph New Orleans at that historically significant moment in time, as the city had just hosted a World's Fair (the Louisiana World Exposition) from May to November of that year. But Smith was not hired simply to produce an architectural photographic record of the city; rather, THNOC allowed him the artistic freedom to photograph those aspects of the city that he felt were most interesting, including the people and sites of local allure. These sites include the various neighborhoods of the city such as the French Quarter, the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, the Garden District, the Central Business District, Uptown, Lakeview, and others, as well as the major festivals including the Jazz & Heritage Festival and Mardi Gras. While Smith was commissioned by THNOC to produce 300 photographs, he submitted 405, out of which he has chosen 46 for this post-Katrina retrospective exhibition entitled New Orleans: A Beloved City.

The photographs in this collection provide an all-encompassing view of the city as it was prior to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Smith captures the city's multifarious neighborhoods which come together to comprise New Orleans' exceptional and vibrant culture. Smith admits that his collection for THNOC is entirely based on his own singular perspective of what he calls "perhaps the most distinctive city in the United States." His photographs vacillate between the rather official, historically iconic buildings and landmarks such as Jackson Square, the Federal Court House and Preservation Hall, the commercially significant Superdome, Hibernia Bank Tower and Central Business District, and the mythic New Orleans of above-ground cemeteries, costumed Mardi Gras revelers and Royal Street in the French District. From the grand old Southern houses in the Garden District to those structures along Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi River and the shotgun houses of Uptown, these photographs, taken in the mid-eighties, are prescient of what the Katrina disaster would later reveal: the social and spatial divisions inherent in this complex city.

A self-taught photographer, Smith embarked on his photographic career in 1966. He began using an 8-by-10 view camera shortly thereafter, later adding 8-by-20 and 18-by-22 view cameras. He prints his photographs as contact prints, a technique in which the 8-by-10 negative is placed directly on top of light sensitive photographic paper. Although this process is much more labor intensive than simply enlarging the negative, it produces remarkably profound and intensely detailed photographs. Smith states of his preferred process, "The bottom line is, it's more beautiful. It gives the prints a presence you just don't get in enlargements." All the photographs in New Orleans: A Beloved City were produced with large-format cameras and developed using gelatin silver chloride contact prints.

Michael A. Smith has photographed in every state of the United States, as well as Western Canada and various parts of Europe. His works are included in the permanent collections of over 100 museums in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. His works have been featured in about 200 exhibitions. He has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been the recipient of major commissions to photograph four American cities. His first book, Landscapes 1975-1979 won Le Grand Prix du Livre at the Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie in Arles, France. In 1992, Smith was honored with a 25-year retrospective exhibition at the International Museum of Photography at Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He lives in Bucks County, PA with his wife, photographer Paula Chamlee.