I didn’t intend to take pictures while in New Orleans, but I brought all my camera equipment, Model Releases, condoms and a check book just in case I found some hot boys that needed extra cash. Better to be safe than sorry, but no such luck this time.
With camera phones so readily available, people just take photos indiscriminately, whether they are traveling or just going about their daily life. I often wonder, what are they going to DO with that picture? Will anyone ever see it – or care? Does it just go onto Facebook to die in that vast media vortex?
I cringe whenever I see people on TV after a fire or natural disaster crying about losing “the family photo albums”, but who has photo albums anymore? If you lose or break your phone, do you go through the same sense of loss? Probably not.
So back to my trip, there were a few shots that I did take just by accident. I certainly didn’t need to purposely take photos of rows of quaint houses with balconies, or strange street people, or voodoo this-n-that. I could just as well buy a postcard with a photo that somebody spent a great deal of time to create and get a better shot, but what would I DO with it?
So many would-be art photographers have been flocking to Detroit the past few years to photograph urban decay that it’s become quite cliche. Hipsters are now referring to it as “Ruin Porn”. New Orleans is such an old city that you see bits of it every where you go, so artsy types have a field day stumbling upon dirt and erosion to photograph every five steps. Other hipsters viewing it will gasp at the “beauty of decay” and marvel at the “genius” who snapped it. Barf.
The first shot was out my hotel window overlooking the old buildings surrounding it. I could expound about how the hotel sits on a site that was built by the Ursaline nuns in 1722 as a hospital and how the hotel staff is “not allowed to talk about the ghosts”. Put that picture in a fancy gallery and assholes will go apeshit over it. The truth is I just needed to do a test shot to see if the batteries were still good. (Am I talented or what?)
Next is a shot from one of New Orleans’ famous cemeteries. Talk about Ruin Porn, people were snapping away at gravestone after gravestone of people they don’t know. I guess I got caught up in it, too, when I saw a mausoleum inscription that read “Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys 1894″. That should be the name of my new porn site, because that’s what I do – pay destitute orphan boys to have sex with each other for relief.
In this one, again, I guess I got suckered into following some silly trend of photographing what I eat. In general, why does anyone want to see your scrambled eggs? I thought it was okay to shoot this lunch because it was made of alligator meat and not many people know what it looks like. (It was one of the best meals of the trip, btw.)
And finally, I snapped this on the last day walking out of a pastry shop across from the hotel. I had walked past that sign in the sidewalk all weekend and everybody I had lunch with missed it, too. It’s such an odd phrase, equivalent to a “Whites Only” water fountain, that I thought I should snap it. After leaving, I actually turned around, went back in and waited in line to ask the meaning of the message embedded in the sidewalk. Apparently, even the proprietors don’t know the history. They think the building might have at one time been an Italian men’s club with gambling, and women were only allowed in a certain section to buy gelato.
See the original post here: Ruin Porn
