New Orleans Walls is a collection of portraits of more than 80 “emblematic” New Orleans people posing in front of walls. The walls were chosen by Verdier, born and raised in France, for their color, texture and various states of falling-down-ness (read beauté). Most of the portraits are accompanied by a story told by each subject about a “significant moment” in his or her life. Anything from being thrown off a horse (Stacy Simmons) to jackknifing on the highway (Spencer Bohren) to cooking pasta a bit too al dente for a one-toothed man (Evan Christopher). Some of these stories are both moving and amusing, but there is no particular direction Verdier wants to take us in, other than to connect us, and herself, to New Orleans. She left the Crescent City with her husband (pianist Scott Kirby) and two daughters for a small North Idaho town in 2000.

The photographic technique used by Verdier is that of double exposure. One, take a picture of a wall with a camera on a tripod. Two, take a picture of a person in front of the same wall, without moving the camera. Verdier started out shooting 35-mm film, where she simply didn’t advance the film for the second exposure, but has since moved on to digital.

People are portrayed as ghosts and passers-by throughout the book, while the walls, albeit weathered, appear solid. This is a fairly European (as opposed to American) view—places and buildings remain; people pass. We “see” the people who have passed before us in flaky plaster and mossy cracks; we love old walls because of our imagined connections with other people through time. Verdier shares this view, I think. But in some ways it stands at odds with what happened here in 2005. Sometimes it’s the places and buildings that pass, while people remain. The template for this book was established long before Katrina (New Orleans Walls has been 16 years in the making) and it’s worth noting that Verdier did not change her artistic approach after the storm. Did she have to? No. The story she wants to tell us is about permanence and constance, and also romance, despite a change in circumstances. Marie-Dominique Verdier speaks with a French accent, and in some way, so does her book.