L.A. Reno

I’m in love. But, more importantly, I’ve just brought my lover to a cocktail party to meet all my colleagues and friends for the first time. I’ve been a little nervous about this whole thing. What if no likes her? What if no one gets her? And, more likely, what if she spills her bloody mary all over her dress…and everyone else’s while she’s at it?!

Two years ago, I drove over the Atchafalaya river delta for my first time, heading southeast from Austin to New Orleans. I had been in grad school at UT for about two months and had embarked on my first trip to the Crescent City with a carload of classmates to go photograph musicians. The thick air with its pungent smells of salt water entered my body and immediately felt known.

As we pulled into the city at three in the morning under the thick fog of one hundred percent humidity, with Spanish moss dripping off the Live Oak tress that taunt the roofs of shotgun homes painted in a myriad of colors, the feeling of fluency intensified. In less than twenty minutes I found myself standing outside in the courtyard of the old orphanage turned hostel where we were staying, and saying out loud, with total conviction, “This is where they’ll bury me.”

The next morning while driving through the 8th Ward, an unfamiliar sound began to rock the car windows. A tuba boomed and gurgled its way around trombones and trumpets somewhere in the neighborhood. With cameras in hand we jumped out and followed that sound until we found its source. Photographing a Jazz Funeral as it organically wound its way through a neighborhood of skeletal Victorian homes with piles of debris that laid like corpses in the streets two years after the storm, I fell fully in love with this god-forsaken place.

As one of the student leaders on this year’s trip back to New Orleans to photograph the effects of the national recession on the city’s limping economy, I find myself taking it all a bit personally. I want my fellow students to love this place and see it for what it is: A completely corrupt, impoverished, and gluttonous mess that is overflowing in beauty, creativity, and cultural richness.

Truth is both elusive and relative in this complicated place. The national media has reported that the city is “insulated” from the recession that is choking most of the country. But as New Orleans' economy remains propped up by federal dollars from the reconstruction after the storm, the budding journalist inside us all has to wonder how true those reports can be.

As the students embark on their attempt to untangle their stories, I can only hope that no one is too distracted by the stain of a spilt bloody mary.