Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 27)

PHOTOGRAPHING NEW ORLEANS Smith reveals very little about what he actually said to those folks, how he persuaded them of his good intentions as an ally in preserving and promoting the spirit world they had made. He was shy; he wanted his photographs to do consciousness toward understanding.” Well, sure. Too bad the prose is not descriptive. And then, in what may be the most epic understatement in what little he actually said about himself, Mike Smith declares: “My expression became more clear and flowing. It was an atmosphere which allowed me to transcend language and cultural barriers and to communicate my deepest feelings. As far as they were concerned, there had been a ‘visitation of the Spirit.’“ That’s about as close as the photojournalist, the documentarian, the reporter of spiritual history gets to explaining those “deepest feelings.” {1937-2008} the speaking for him. The pictures in Spirit World are among the finest he made. Although his later, color photographs in Mardi Gras Indians shimmer with life, Smith worked best in black and white. Three images from the 1982 ordination of Bishop Marvin Johnson have an almost cinematic quality, like scenes from a reel. In Marvin Johnson “Buried in the Spirit” the presiding bishop in his robes surrounded by congregants in dark and white robes, leans over a white shroud, his hands extended above the lower legs, candles in the lower right of the frame. The image alone suggests a final prayer over someone dead beneath a shroud. The next picture — Marvin Johnson, “Reborn As A Bishop” — shows the resurrected figure from beneath the shroud, standing up in his robe, his arms extended behind him in a moment of exaltation, like Yeats’s dancer-become-the dance. Moments of this kind show the photojournalist at the peak of his talent, but more so, the aesthetic sensibility Smith had “IN AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR ARE INSEPARABLE. JUST AS JAZZ COMBINES DISPARATE ELEMENTS INTO A HARMONIOUS WHOLE, JAZZ FUNERALS MERGE CHURCH LIFE WITH STREET LIFE.” — MICHAEL P. SMITH, FROM THE BOOK M A R D I G R A S I N D I A N S , 1994 Winter 2008-09/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 27 Untitled (Second-line parade)

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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