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    Spirit World
    Spirit World
    Spirit World
    Ebook145 pages44 minutes

    Spirit World

    By Michael Smith

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    About this ebook

    The author of New Orleans Jazz Fest documents the thriving cultural richness of the Black Big Easy and captures the expressions of urban folk culture.
     
    Many Black neighborhoods in New Orleans are perceived by outsiders as being areas of decay. However, to photographer Michael P. Smith, in these neighborhoods remained the preserves of a rich cultural heritage. Smith, who photographed the subject for more than twenty years, saw the city’s African-American culture as “cultural wetlands” that engender much of the traditional music and folk life that have made New Orleans famous.
     
    Smith, who was allowed to witness some of the most private religious ceremonies of the Spiritual Churches, captured the unbridled emotion of ceremony participants. Dramatic black and white stills show baptisms, possession trances, social-club marches, communion services, and street life. Midway through the book, an explosion of color serves as a transition from religious photographs to ones that are more secular and gives readers a spectacular glimpse at Mardi Gras Indians, a religious ordination, and a jazz funeral.
     
    Spirit World originally appeared in 1983 as a popular traveling exhibit, which won a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. Overwhelming positive reaction to the exhibit led the author to publish this catalogue of images and accompanying journal. Photographs from this book and two of Smith’s other books, A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz Fest: A Pictorial History, have appeared in an exhibit at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. The one-man exhibit used images and field recordings to give a true sense of the featured culture.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 31, 1992
    ISBN9781455612291
    Spirit World
    Author

    Michael Smith

    Michael Smith is an award-winning British journalist and author, having previously served in British military intelligence. He has written for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and is the author of fifteen books on spies and special operations, including the No 1 bestseller Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park. He lives in Henley-on-Thames.

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      Book preview

      Spirit World - Michael Smith

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      INTRODUCTION

      New Orleans is known as a city which has made the preservation of its old buildings and districts into something of an art form. The Vieux Carré, Faubourg Marigny, the Garden District, Esplanade Ridge and Bayou St. John are but a few of the places where paint, bricks, mortar and money have transformed the falling facades, the rusted stairways and the faded wallpaper into whole structures that bring ahhs from tourists, house and garden magazines and architectural antiquarians. History comes alive, it is said, through such restored dwellings, markets and theatres.

      The opposite of such preservation is decay. New Orleans (and Louisiana) has decay aplenty too. The places are obvious enough and need not be named. Yet it has always seemed ironic to me that in many of the places where physical decay is a fact of life, cultural traditions — the lifeblood of New Orleans —are the strongest. Where the old buildings are the most carefully restored row upon row, the living culture implied in the structures is often long past. This is not to say that paint and plaster and the historians' eyes should not work their metamorphoses on the urban landscape. But when you really start thinking about buildings, you realize that it's the people who build and live in them who are the carriers of the culture. The buildings are one physical manifestation of culture. Thus in New Orleans, a city of unique architectural landscapes, it is the spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves that intrigue me. It is life on the street that makes New Orleans like no other city in North America and quite a bit more like places such as Port-au-Prince, Port-of-Spain or Lima. The built environment of New Orleans taken alone is a movie set without actors.

      Some of the finest actors in New Orleans are Mardi Gras Indians, Spiritual Church leaders, black social club presidents, shoeshine men, car washers, second-liners, soul food cooks, stoop sitters, jazz, blues and gospel musicians, costume makers, and funeral parade marshals. They run the gamut from masquerading frolic to quiet dignity, from careful formal attire and behavior to ragged clothes and funky existentialism. They represent the places and faces of the Afro-American communities of New Orleans. They would not be on the walls of this exhibit or the pages of this book were it not for their documentor and presentor, Michael P. Smith.

      In an era of omnipresent shutter clicks from tourists' 35-mm cameras and quick journalism photography for slick magazines, Michael Smith goes in depth and takes his time. He has been photographing the black street culture, the possession trances of Spiritual Church members, the bejeweled call-response of Mardi Gras Indians, the car dealers, hustlers and crusaders of black New Orleans for over fifteen years. During that time he has had his share of troubles — life in the streets of the Big Easy, especially as a photographer, is not always easy. He has also had his share of triumphs. There have been awards, fellowships and such. However, for Smith, the most significant of these have come in small ways: a night at the uptown Mardi Gras Indian bar, the Glass House, when there is universal approval of his shots from the practice session of the previous week. Or there's a visit to the home of the brilliant young carnival costume maker, Charles Taylor, where, on the dusty hot third floor of the Thalia Street Projects, Smith finds his photographs of Taylor posted on the aquamarine painted living room wall next to Best Costume trophies and the souvenirs a sailor friend has sent from Africa.

      In a world where people focus on finished products and projects, Smith has chosen to live for the people and communities he photographs. He has committed himself to the humanistic documentary process. He has not, until now, produced a book or a major exhibit. More often than not, he has given away much that he prints to the people who inspired him to record their culture in the first place. In this sense he is in the best tradition of humanistic anthropology as well as photography. He uses his artistic and technological abilities on behalf of the group with whom he works, he is like the ethnographer in that his commitment to the field, the community and the people as carriers of culture, is a long-term one. He even goes beyond the field ethnographer in that he continues to live around the community that he documents — always headed off for a fish fry, gospel jam session, or a

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