This is one of several pieces of contemporary sculptures commemorating the musicians who made this place “the birthplace of jazz.” It stands near the city’s French Market, and features two-dimensional statues of musicians encircling a fountain. I limit my image to three of them, dominated by a trombone player painted in blue and yellow primary colors. Two other celebrants add context.

The front doors of restaurants get a lot of use, and acquire many fingerprints over the course of a day. They are cleaned over and over again, and in this image I abstract the person responsible to maintain the appearance of this particular door. By placing his face behind the door frame, and featuring only the two hands at work – one holding a bottle of window cleaner and the other a paper towel – I make this image into a universal symbol of man at work. I include the restaurant’s logo as useful context.

A winter sun breaks through the clouds hanging over the city's most historic block – the 18th century St. Louis Cathedral, along with its historic Presbytere, which once housed priests, later became city hall, and is now a museum. I exposed for the sun, allowing it to become a perfect sphere while at the same time abstracting the structures around it.

Heavy fog had settled over Jackson Square as I made this image. While the fog gave the image an timeless atmospheric quality, the bright blue and red umbrella at the right edge of the frame originally pulled the eye away from the center of interest, which is the pair of pedestrians at center. I converted the image to black and white to draw the eye back to the center of the image, relegating the umbrella to the background. The figure in the long coat or dress seems as if it has come from another time, adding a haunted quality to the scene. To those who know New Orleans history, the ghostly scene will also be reinforced by the presence of the fog-shrouded Pontalba Apartments in the background. Built in 1850, these apartments flank both sides of Jackson Square, and are said to be the oldest continuously occupied rented rooms in the United States. (Some of them are considered haunted – Clarence John Laughlin, whose book “Ghosts along the Mississippi” set the standard for haunting imagery, lived here in a Pontalba apartment for many years.)

The morning fog was so heavy that at first I could not see either the famous equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson or the St. Louis Cathedral that combine to give this square its identity. I could barely see anything ten twenty feet in front of me. The Square is bounded on one side by the Mississippi River, and given the river’s shifting winds, I guessed that the fog might eventually thin to reveal traces of either the statue or the church, or perhaps even both at the same time. And that is what is happening at this moment. Just as three people (all of them dressed in the primary colors of red and blue) walked past the square’s familiar bending palms towards the statue, the fog thinned a bit to reveal the statue and barely imply the church rising behind it in the mist. I spent about a half hour at the scene, and during that time worked along side of a local professional photographer who told me that this kind of heavy fog occurs here only sporadically. The last such fog was 12 months earlier. I made over 100 images as the fog changed its intensity, and this was the photograph that best fulfilled my intentions. It offers an appropriate ending to this photographic essay on my long weekend in the Big Easy.