“I never want to see another picture of ________.” Industry veterans share their pet peeves on themes in contemporary photography. In this series they present their “rule” along with five photographs that break the rule in an effort to show that great work is the exception to the rule.

Rule Setter: Brian Piper, Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Photographs, New Orleans Museum of Art
Rule Breaker: L. Kasimu Harris

Let me acknowledge at the outset that I may be of the wrong curatorial disposition for this exercise. Sure, I grow tired of certain trends and there are some subjects that no longer hold my interest. But I also think that that there is a place for every photograph, and believe that even the most well-trod cliché can still be turned just enough to become interesting. When I’m no longer regularly surprised by photos and photographers, I hope I’ll start looking for a new vocation.

All that being said, one of the more delicately nuanced aspects of my professional life is to explain to someone across a review table why their compassionately conceived documentary project about their hometown, while historically important and cleanly executed, could still be a hard sell for a collector of fine art photography. What I do find useful in these conversations is highlighting the work of a photographer whose work moves smoothly across these boundaries, helps to illustrate how our ideas of photographic genres can be fluid, even arbitrary, and change over time. My favorite photographs often attempt to satisfy (or break) multiple sets of “rules.” In the spirit of this space then, I suppose I never want to see another photograph that only attempts to do one thing at a time.

L. Kasimu Harris is a photographer whose work refuses easy categorization. Trained as a journalist, Harris also possesses a screenwriter’s mind for both character and narrative and is able to translate these concepts into his photographs. In the past Harris has staged scenes that approach fantasy, while tracing through lines between historical events and contemporary social justice concerns in his native New Orleans. In his ongoing series, Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges (on view now at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh), Harris also considers an important issue facing the city. Since the levees broke in 2005, demographic shifts and rapid gentrification have displaced residents and changed the makeup of historically African American neighborhoods like Treme and the 7th Ward. Harris marks these changes in the turnover of neighborhood barroom ownership and patronage: from Black to White, from an older to a younger generation, and from native New Orleanians to transplants. In this series, Harris takes a more straightforward approach than his previous projects, and the works are variously successful as journalism, as pure document, and as art, often all within the same frame. 

Harris’ photograph Where Ya People From (2019) could serve as a kind of lede, encapsulating some of the factors at play across the city. Many of the bars Harris photographs have been black-owned for generations, but when longtime owners sell the business or building to white-ownership, these traditionally black leisure spaces often disappear. Verret’s Lounge is an exception to this trend in that the new owners have allowed Black Masking Indians and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs—named on the banners on the wall—that have historically met at the bar to continue to do so. The mixed races of the drinkers, however, hints at recent changes. The vastly different focal planes between those in the foreground and the background suggests a disconnect, perhaps an anxiety about what the future will bring. The rich red tones, for all of that color’s association with vice, represent warmth and comfort here. That palette, perhaps unsurprisingly, extends across a number of bars photographed for the series, suggesting that all of these businesses are facing some of the same threats and same choices.

In several photographs in the series Harris documents the material culture in the bars, using them to tell layered stories, much like the work of Birney Imes at Whispering Pines. “Saints and Patrons” (2018) includes numerous programs from memorial celebrations. Left behind over the years by mourning second-liners, their names and portraits testify to the importance of a place like Sportsman’s Corner to the social fabric of black New Orleans. The array of bottles on display in “Meet Me at the Altar” (2018)—back at Verret’s—reflects the beverage preferences of a newly culturally diverse clientele. In the upper left corner, novelty veladoras devoted to the Saints Prince and Bruce Springsteen call to mind the racially charged debate between Mookie and Pino in Do the Right Thing, and remind us that this photograph is about much more than Happy Hour specials.

In other works, Harris makes unmistakable art historical references. Some are playful, like in “Precious, Unc, and Andrew” (2019), where we might imagine Michelangelo finding inspiration for “The Creation of Adam” while sitting at the Purple Rain Bar. In “Precious” (2019), titled after the subject, Harris gives that familiar red light a Rembrandt-turn to make a captivating portrait of the Purple Rain bartender during a phone call. In another untitled work, however, Harris really harnesses the unique qualities of photographic vision to make a complex and layered image (“This is Our Moment,” 2019). Taken from inside Seal’s Class Act during a break in the Dumaine Street Gang S&P Club’s Sunday Second Line parade, Harris uses the camera’s tendency to flatten space to stack elements in a way that rewards deep looking—from the satiny texture of the flag, to the ‘X’ of one man’s back brace up to three heads framed playfully in the doorway, all overseen by a photograph of President Obama above the door. This photograph, much like the liquor poster on the wall suggests, is in itself a kind of toast “to the culture” that these social spaces have long-nurtured for black New Orleanians. Like others in the Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges series this photograph accomplishes many things—it is news, it is a record, and it is visually complex. Hopefully, Harris’ work will also be a call to action.