The visual legacy of Florestine Perrault Collins, who documented African American life in New Orleans Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s Black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.  Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.  It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins's great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins's story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This book illuminates the fascinating story and visual legacy of Florestine Perrault Collins, who documented African American life in New Orleans between 1920 and 1949.

"New Orleans Portrayed is a photographic tableau that offers a body of work portraying the cityscape and its citizens. It is a window into their existence at this point in time-both a broad-brush view as well as a pointillist approach into what makes New Orleans unique"--

This original anthology of noir fiction set across the Big Easy includes new stories by Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Maureen Tan, and more. New Orleans has always the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico, and the heartless con artist. And in post-Katrina times, it’s the same old story—only with a new breed of carpetbagger thrown in. In other words, it’s fertile ground for noir fiction. This sparkling collection of tales, set both before and after the storm, explores the city’s gutted neighborhoods, its outwardly gleaming “sliver by the river,” its still-raunchy French Quarter, and other hoods so far from the Quarter they might as well be on another continent. It also looks back into the city’s darkly colorful, nineteenth century past. New Orleans Noir includes brand-new stories by Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Patty Friedmann, Barbara Hambly, Tim McLoughlin, Olympia Vernon, David Fulmer, Jervey Tervalon, James Nolan, Kalamu ya Salaam, Maureen Tan, Thomas Adcock, Jeri Cain Rossi, Christine Wiltz, Greg Herren, Julie Smith, Eric Overmyer, and Ted O’Brien. A portion of the profits from New Orleans Noir will be donated to Katrina KARES, a hurricane relief program sponsored by the New Orleans Institute that awards grants to writers affected by the hurricane.

Follows a nineteenth-century woman of color as she makes pralines, then strolls through the French Quarter of New Orleans selling the sweets to passersby and shopkeepers. Includes historical note.

George Dureau: The Photographs is an album of the great photographic portraits made throughout the 40 years of Dureau's artistic career--a New Orleans romance between the photographer and his subjects. All of Dureau's exquisite photographs, many of them nudes of black and disabled men, were made in his studio in the French Quarter of New Orleans, or on the city's streets. He began photography for the pleasure of photographing his lovers, and as research material for his paintings. Only later on did he begin to take his photographs seriously as works of art in their own right. Many of his subjects became part of Dureau's "extended family," whom he photographed on different occasions over many years. Surprisingly, only one book of Dureau's photographs has been published, New Orleans (1985), a modest paperback long out of print. This Aperture book is possible now because of the commitment of Dureau's supporters. George Dureau: The Photographs is edited by Chris Boot, with a text by Philip Gefter. George Dureau (1930-2014) was a painter, sculptor and photographer known for his focus on the male nude. His paintings, which draw on classical and baroque traditions, command regional and national recognition, and his photographs of nudes, street people and people who are maimed and deformed (often figures also incorporated within his paintings and sculptures) have garnered international acclaim. Often compared to Robert Mapplethorpe's work, Dureau's black male nudes predate Mapplethorpe's Black Book pictures by several years. Also classically formal, they distinguish themselves from Mapplethorpe's work by the nature of the connection between photographer and subject. Dureau's career has been the subject of retrospectives at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2006 and 2011) and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2009). The first exhibition of his photographs in New York (at Higher Pictures) was in 2012.