Creole World: Photographs of New Orleans and the Latin American Sphere
by Richard Sexton
essays by Jay D. Edwards and John H. Lawrence
Published by The Historic New Orleans Collection
240 pages; 203 photographs
$49.95 retail
ISBN – 13: 978-0-917860-66-9
Publication Date: April 2014
Streetscene, Centro Habana, 2009.
Synopsis
In 1974, when RIchard Sexton was 20 years old and had recently developed a serious interest in photography, he traveled overland from southwest Georgia, where he lived at the time, to Bolivia for the primary purpose of taking photographs and exploring the world. New Orleans was the first stop on this formative trip. In 1991, he would move to New Orleans from San Francisco, and in the years that followed he authored and photographed many titles on New Orleans, on Louisiana, and the Gulf South. In 2006, he returned to Latin America for the first time since 1974. Ostensibly, he was vacationing in Buenos Aires, though the trip immediately rekindled his early photographic interests in Latin America. Two years later, he traveled to Panama and Ecuador, at which point the idea for a photographic book emerged combining his New Orleans and Louisiana photography with new photography from places in Latin America and the Caribbean which shared visual, cultural, and historical connections with Louisiana. In 2009, Sexton was granted a license to travel to Cuba for the project. The following year, he returned to Colombia to photograph in Cartegena de Indias. Finally, in 2013, The Historic New Orleans Collection provided funding for his travel to Haiti to complete the project.
Creole World is a complex, multi-layered photo essay linking New Orleans, which is frequently referred to as ” the nothernmost Caribbean city”, with its cultural kin further south. The similarities are quite striking and at times even uncanny. There are photographs of many urban places and neighborhoods that are difficult to travel to and photograph in, such as El Chorrillo in Panama City, a poor neighborhood adjacent to Casco Viejo, the historic district of Panama. El Chorrillo was bombed and invaded by the first Bush administration in the late 80s in pursuit of Manuel Noriega. El Chorrillo has never fully recovered from this devastation and it is known today for its blight, high murder rate, and drug dealing activity. Due to the US embargo, Cuba is inaccessible to Americans as a tourist destination and over the last half-century has become a “forbidden island” to US citizens. Richard Sexton traveled to and photographed not only in Havana, but throughout Cuba, in Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Santa Clara, Santiago de Cuba, and other locales. Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the difficult, to virtually impossible conditions of its aftermath, the US State Department recommends against any recreational travel to Haiti. In spite of all the difficulties in contemporary Haiti, Richard Sexton traveled and photographed throughout the country from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel to Cap-Haitien. The culmination of these travels has resulted in Creole World, which immerses the reader in an exotic world they would never be able to see on their own.
Streetscene, Centro Habana, 2009.
Creole World is accompanied by a traveling exhibit of the same name currently on view in the Laura Simon Nelson Galleries of The Historic New Orleans Collection from April 15 to December 7, 2014. Gallery hours are Tuesday thru Saturday 9:30-4:30.
Streetscene, Centro Habana, 2009.
(this text was published on the webste of Sexton)