Photographer Richard Sexton’s photo book about New Orleans, Elegance and Decadence (with text by Randy Delehanty), is one of the greatest works of Louisiana literature, on the same Himalayan level as the folkloric compendium Gumbo Ya-Ya and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of Elegance and Decadence, a circumstance to be commemorated with a retrospective of Sexton’s photographs entitled Memory Chambers at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, opening on October 4.
“I had the idea to do the book before I moved here in 1991,” Colquitt, Georgia native Sexton explains. “I had visited New Orleans and I had decided, years and years ago, that if I ever moved back to the South—I’d lived all my adult life in California, I was going to move to New Orleans because I felt like that was the only place where you could be in the South and be an expatriate at the same time. I made that decision, for a lot of reasons, and moved to New Orleans.
“I was doing books in San Francisco—these fairly elaborate photo essays on a variety of design, architecturally-related topics. In fact, Elegance and Decadence was the fourth book I’d done but nobody here knew my earlier books, being as they were not local, regional subjects. You know, nobody in New Orleans knows anything, or cares about anything, but New Orleans [laughs].
“The working title throughout the project was The Elegance of Decay. There is a photograph in the exhibit that bears that title. We thought that that title, ultimately, was not quite descriptive enough. For one thing, my collaborator Randy Delehanty was the son of a dentist and he said, ‘When you say decay, nobody thinks about anything but tooth decay!’ Elegance and Decadence was something I came up with that was a little more descriptive of what the photo essay was really about—because it showed these two extremes of New Orleans.
“It was my philosophy that that’s what was compelling about New Orleans: it was interesting at the high and low ends. It’s always been known for that. And like most places, it’s kind of ordinary in the middle. So really the book was about these strains of grandeur and faded grandeur.
“I’m very influenced by how things age and the sense of passage of time that’s conveyed whenever you experience something like a ruin or a very old object or a collection of things that are the result of the slow process of accretion, of gradually acquiring and adding on to, and cobbling to this original thing—whatever it is. That’s basically what my work is about—it’s about the effect of the passage of time.
“That’s why New Orleans is such a fascinating place—because it’s been around a long time and a lot of interesting things were done here and have survived here. We can now look at them and it becomes a window to another world. I’m captivated by memory, which I think is an extraordinary human trait.
“When you think about it, memory is a uniquely human ability to have recall—vivid recall of something that happened a very long time ago. And to be able to string together your life experiences the way that we can.
“Reality is nothing more than a fleeting given moment—it’s over in a second. Without the ability to take that and process it and combine it with all these other little slices of time, everything’s pretty meaningless without it. I think that’s why I’m captivated by old things and what has happened and the scars of what has happened. It’s just like an archeologist looking through some strata of earth and being able to see clues from different eras. For me, so many of the subjects that I photograph in New Orleans have that kind of quality.
“I’m also very interested in the vernacular and hand-made things. I’m constantly fascinated by what people do. To draw a parallel, music is definitely one of those very human creations, even though it’s very abstract. A large percentage of the music we enjoy is in some sort of recorded form. A hundred years ago, the only way we could experience music was live music. The recording of music radically expanded the musical audience.
“Nearly everything that we do is in some way or another an outgrowth of the culture that we’re a part of. I think there is a common element to New Orleans art, New Orleans architecture, New Orleans music, New Orleans writing, and New Orleans celebrations. It all ties in together. There’s a lot of unique history here, a lot of things that came together here that did not come together in other places, and that’s what makes New Orleans unique and different. There are a lot of voices out there that say we need to be like every other place and it gives me pause every time I hear that we have to be more like Houston or Atlanta if we’re going to survive. All it would take to finish New Orleans off would be to get Houston-ized or turned into a facsimile of Atlanta. It would kill the place. New Orleans has survived, and is what it is, because of this difference.”
WHITE BITCH
Michael Patrick Welch quit his job as a Tampa newspaper reporter, and headed to Costa Rica where he could “swim in the ocean, chase gorgeous Latin prostitutes and write for six hours a day.” A fellow traveler assured him that “New Orleans is cheap and wild.” Mike arrived in New Orleans via Greyhound bus and became employed as a busboy at a famed restaurant and as a creative writing teacher at a public high school, where his students nicknamed him The White Bitch, a title Welch now utilizes when he performs music, armed with wit and an electric guitar. His sojourn in New Orleans is documented in his latest novel, The Donkey Show, copies of which Mike will sign at El Matador Lounge on October 24. The same evening at the club, appearing as The White Bitch, Mike will perform such original songs as “Pussy is a Present” and “In Front of God and Everyone.”
Among Welch’s many wonderful observations in The Donkey Show are these lines devoted to the Vieux Carré: “Without tourism cheapening the atmosphere, there was space to appreciate how every wall in the Quarter is of a different age, texture, color and material than every other decaying wall. Architectural pathos vibrated in an emptiness matched only by the silent day I moved here, when they’d just finished sweeping away Fat Yesterday. Only on Ash Wednesday and during wars is the Quarter free to be the famous pink, yellow, pale-green, dark-blue, white and orange quilt of sweating wood, iron, brick, stucco, lace, colored glass and alcohol that used to stir the souls of real artists. Its cracks, chips and fades unobscured by white flesh, the Quarter is living proof that, left the fuck alone, things fall into their own perfect composition.”
ROTTEN PEACHES
My personal most anticipated autumn musical performance was going to be the return of Peaches (who’s just released her Fatherfucker CD, co-starring Iggy Pop) to the Spellcaster Lodge, hosted by Quintron and Miss Pussycat. Q. and Miss P. even commissioned me to create a poster for the event. I devoted countless hours of research to the project, closely examining the myriad snapshots of Peaches’ crotch posted on her personal web site. I was psyched!
And then Miss Pussycat called with the sad news that Peaches has blown off her recital in the Ninth Ward for a series of concerts in Brazil! The nerve! The gall! The karmic injustice! I hope Peaches gets such a severe sunburn that the mere thought of slipping into a dental floss tanga will drive her nuts!
