Portraits: Photographs in New Orleans 1998-2009
ISBN 10: 0-9706190-5-7 ISBN13: 978-0-9706190-5-1 Paper, 114 pages, 8.5 x 8.5 inches 26.95
October, 2009 This collection of intimate portraits of one hundred New Orleanians delivers compelling insights into the city and its inhabitants. Each portrait captures one of the artist's friends in a back yard or other intimate setting, with the collection as a whole painting a vivid portrait of the city itself and the way people live in it.
Jonathan Traviesa’s environmental portraits are as compelling as a northern renaissance painting: sitter and surroundings meticulously described but still enigmatic. The clarity of these pictures is a paradox, presenting mystery rather than conclusion.
John Lawrence
Director of Museum Programs
Historic New Orleans Collection
The one hundred individuals who share the pages of this book also share something else, space and time together in New Orleans. Many of these folks know each other. Some are married to each other. Others are complete strangers to one another. Interrelationships aside, they form the complex human fabric of New Orleans. And they are diverse. There are teenagers and the middle-aged closing in on a pension. There are exotic dancers, waitresses, social workers and socialites, black and white, and just about every other artificial separation of humanity one might want to seize on for categorization, but Jonathan’s narrative isn’t about difference. It’s about commonality.
Richard Sexton
(from the Introduction)
|
Catalog of Current Titles 
Photographs by Jonathan Traviesa