New Orleans volume ii
£30.00
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140 pages. 240x170mm/9.5x7.5in soft cover book featuring work by artist and photographer Laura Meek celebrating the relationship of colour, light and design of New Orleans architecture.
After the hugely successful selling out of the first edition, limited to 100 copies at the end of 2022, the book is now being released as a second edition with extra pages added and new imagery (recently shot since the launch of the first book) worked into the original collection. Many more colour studies are also explored in this edition. This acts as a partner piece to the original for those who have collected the first.
My book, New Orleans is a photographic celebration of the colours, light and design of architecture in the French Quarter, taken over the last two years on visits back home to Louisiana. As anyone who has visited will tell you, there is something magical about the city. Anne Rice’s mournful vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac, Truman Capote’s flamboyant writing soaked in sun-dappled Louisiana light, moody composer Trent Reznor, Mahalia Jackson, Kate Chopin, John Kennedy Toole, Louis Armstrong and Benjamin Button A few famous names (and a few fictional ones…) that have hailed from New Orleans and whose work and personalities simmer with southern drama, beauty and intellectual grit.
There is a gorgeous patina of illumination and romance present in the French Quarter influenced and sustained by years of sun and subtropical weather. This distinctive Big Easy vibe brings alive the array of architectural splendors revealed in the details of the city’s celebrated facades.
During my childhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during innumerable day trips to New Orleans I fell in love with the carefully orchestrated elegance of the French Quarter. My desire for this contemplative series of photographs was to create a collection of colour studies to better understand and appreciate just what makes up the architectural palette of the architecture. There is gothic enchantment and a real sense of past lives in the allure of the French Quarter.
Layers of paint, chipped, preserved like history itself. Lines of windows, porches, walls, ironwork and door frames precariously adjusted to time. French and Spanish design meet Colonial and Creole influences to create this city I love. The uniquely southern American chiaroscuro of New Orleans defines the range of colours, broad as the Mississippi river is wide. European meets Southern Gothic aesthetic. The light has travelled with me as an image-maker and artist. No matter where I voyage and make land, the light follows.
Laura Meek
