NEW ORLEANS

There is nowhere else on earth quite like New Orleans.

Not the music alone. Not the food. Not the streets. But all of it together — a feast for every sense, a culture so specific to this one place that it cannot be exported or replicated.

I came twice for the fisrs time in 2000 — drawn by the New Orleans Jazz Festival and what lived beyond its stages. The Second Line. The Mardi Gras Indians in their magnificent regalia — costumes hand-sewn over an entire year, never worn twice.

But what I photographed was not the feathers or the beadwork.

It was their faces. Their eyes. The human being living beneath the grand and pompous costume — voicing an interior world of identity, roots and joy that has survived everything this city has survived.

Selected prints available upon inquiry.