In 1973 I arrived in New Orleans from France and began my work as a street photographer in the French Quarter. I was amazed by the richness of the life in those streets. It was in fact a sanctuary for all kinds of people and activities – musicians, fortune tellers, tap dancers, strippers, eccentrics of every stripe – people from different worlds gathered in one small neighborhood.
At the time, I was reading Baudelaire’s great Spleen de Paris about wandering the streets of Paris, and New Orleans seemed to me as much a city of symbols and correspondences as his Paris of the 19th century. SANCTUARY is what I saw as a ‘flâneur’ in the French Quarter from 1973 to 1987.
