December 2024

This new book offers stunning night-time photographs of the Crescent City – and an insightful introduction by Richard Campanella.
   

– by John S. Sledge

Our son, Matthew, and daughter-in-law, Noel, recently shared photographs of an evening wedding reception they attended at the Marigny Opera House. The building, formerly Holy Trinity Catholic Church (1853), backgrounded the outdoor images with its soaring twin towers, arched openings, and weathered stucco walls. Big bulb string lights glowed just over the heads of the elegantly dressed attendees. 

Dark suits, dresses, and long gloves merged with the gloaming, while crisp white shirts, pearl necklaces, and floral crowns drew the eye. Wine sparkled in casually held Chardonnay glasses, and the surrounding city lights softly illumined a broken gray cloud deck.

As I studied these pictures’ graceful blend of history, architecture, decay, romance, and good cheer they struck me as quintessentially New Orleans.  Indeed, they could hardly have been anyplace else.  

Matthew and Noel’s photos returned to mind when Nocturnal New Orleans (LSU Press, hardcover, $59.95) arrived in my mailbox the other day. This stunning new volume by geography professor Richard Campanella, associate dean of research at Tulane and a prolific author, with photographs by Marco Rasi, a certified commercial drone pilot and lens wizard, follows an earlier collaborative volume, Above New Orleans: Roofscapes of the Crescent City (LSU Press, 2021).

Like that book, Nocturnal New Orleans features a short introduction by Campanella followed by Rasi’s pictures captioned by the author. 

“Moreso than most cities,” Campanella declares, “New Orleans has a witching hour—no demons or witches, but a palpable wildness that emanates from darkened streets in the oldest neighborhoods.” 

Visitors have noticed it since at least the early 19th century. “The instant the [sun] sets,” the Irish traveler Thomas Ashe wrote in 1806, “animation begins to rise, the public walks are crowded...the inhabitants promenade on the Leveé ... the billiard rooms resound, music strikes up, and life and activity resume their joyous career.” 

Campanella contends that this nighttime vibe is “not merely a literary or cinematic construct” but rather an “explainable, rational phenomenon.”  Indeed, take a city through which the wealth of a continent passes and into which the world’s goods arrive, and you have an environment conducive to commerce, culture, and endless possibility. 

During the 19th century, the Crescent City’s status as both a river town and a seaport continually brought unattached young men seeking to let off steam. Locals happily provided them with plenty of opportunities. At night, a freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude took hold until money and strength failed. Houses of prostitution, barrooms, theaters, and gambling dens all did a roaring business. 

These days, conventioneers, concertgoers, sports fans, fraternity boys, Mardi Gras revelers, and tourists more generally crowd Bourbon Street from dusk until the wee hours seeking excitement, drinks, and merriment. People have always expected to have a good time in New Orleans, far from hometown constraints. 

There are also those who seek quieter pleasures–a walking tour through the darkened byways, a thoughtful stroll around Jackson Square to contemplate art or sample the diverse offerings provided by talented buskers.  Hence the city’s evening magic, a “rational cultural response in a distinctly pivotal place,” in Campanella’s words.

Campanella’s captions for the spectacular images that follow are a mix of one-line identifiers, lengthier historical/geographical explanations (some up to 200 words), and literary excerpts from past travelers as well as modern philosophical meditations by writers Nick Dunn (Dark Matters, 2016) and Mark Caldwell (New York Night, 2005). 

This varied labeling generally works given that there are 279 pictures on display. Campanella is the knowledgeable guide at the browser’s elbow, each remark well-chosen and appropriate to the spirit of the shot.

Of course, the pictures are the thing, and they are marvelous. Rasi includes bird’s-eye shots and street-level views of diverse parts of the city including the French Quarter, the Marigny, the Bywater, the Press Street railyards, the Central Business District, Mid-City, the Garden District, the Batture, and New Orleans East.  

Throughout, the photographs exhibit an amber cast thanks to the prevalence of sodium vapor lighting, and some look for all the world like a painting. For example, the cover illustration (three musicians next to a three-story, galleried building) strikes the viewer as more the product of the brush than the lens, despite the interior caption’s assurance that it is a photograph.  

There are several memorable shots of the French Quarter, including a sweeping view of the entire district at dusk, lights twinkling on, a heavy mist descending, and the river a sinuous and darkening band bounding the scene. 

This being New Orleans, there are numerous drone shots of processions—the Krewe of Chewbacchus parading down Decatur Street, the Knights of Babylon marching along Magazine Street, a “post-nuptial second line” on Decatur, and of course Bourbon Street’s nightly human torrent. 

Given the drone’s elevation and distance, these pictures carry an impersonal quality, imposing an emotional distance compared to Rasi’s street-level views of revelers and partiers, where costumes and facial expressions dominate. 

It is difficult to select favorites in a work of such quality and scope. Nonetheless, my personal standouts include “A flâneur on Pirates Alley,” featuring a lone eccentric gesticulating in the fog; another fog shot of a solitary pedestrian atop the levee; the U.S. Customs House foregrounded by parked cars on a rain-puddled street (this one also looks like a painting);  an aerial shot of the CBD and the Faubourg Marigny; and the World’s Fair folly “Fisherman’s Castle” on Irish Bayou, “just about the first or last ‘house’ they [motorists] see within the municipal limits of New Orleans.”

Nocturnal New Orleans will surely please any lover of the Crescent City. It beautifully captures the city’s after-hours personality in an altogether original fashion. 

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