my approach to photographing New Orleans was to document the city, street by street. i thought to myself, when i am done, i'll have mapped this city on foot. in my mind, the photos were taken to essentially geocache the city, through visuals, as it is/was now. i love recognizing a door frame, a tree, the curve in a street - all from the ground plan i built through my archive of tens of thousands of photos.
i was fortunate enough to shadow, photograph and video other talented artists dedicated to making the city more beautiful.
by nature, i choose projects that allow me to hyperfocus, document, gather, and archive. examples include: endangered language documentation - foraging, drying, and bottling fallen New Orleans flowers - obsessively photographing new orleans as if i were visually mapping it in time.
Bible of New Orleans, as a methodology, mirrors my documentation of Kaqchikel, an endangered indigenous mayan language from Guatemala. during a span of ten years, i recorded and documented the language, collecting a massive archive of words, phrases, definitions and long form recording, including folk tales and historical accounts.
my love of documenting languages and people began in Mexico, when i shadowed a self-taught doctor in the mountains of Chiapas. i had my notebook, and i would write down phrases (phonetically) in Tzotzil, the local indigenous Mayan language. the doctor, Sergio Castro, spoke seven languages. someone else later documented him and he was featured in the New York Times. he was probably the most influential person in my life.
what followed was years of picking up and documenting (some of the) languages. for example, after six months of living, mostly in a tent, in Tanzania, i was conversational in Kiswahili. once i realized learning languages is glorified pattern recognition i was hooked.
language was the initial reason i chose to stay in New Orleans. i started documenting Louisiana Creole, a language that has less than 10,000 speakers. below is a link to videos, and the incredible, absolutely fascinating and brilliant men who let me into their worlds. a very special shout out to Taalib Pierre-Auguste, Daniele Simpson, and Jorge Sisson, all doing amazing work to preserve language, culture, and history.