Leon Levenstein On the Vicarious Outsider Experience of Taking Pictures

This is a quote From an Article in American Suburb X: See link in Photography section for full article interview. 

Leon Levinstein: Well, it’s sort of a vicarious experience when you photograph. Because you’re always on the outside. They’re having a good time there, maybe a family, or a couple families, having a picnic, eating this fried chicken and potato salad and all that junk. And you’re on the outside, you know, trying to sneak a picture. You walk around them and around them and look and look and see if for a moment something might happen, and they don’t invite you to sit down and have fried chicken. You’re always on the outside. And then you go somewhere else, but again you’re on the outside. And if you have somebody with you it’s no good, they detract you from what you’re doing. So you got to be alone and work alone. And it’s a lonely—a very lonely occupation, if you want to call it that.

I could really relate to the necessity of working alone. It's not something you can take people to do with you. I do ask if I can take pictures though and many of my pictures are posed. When I go back a second time though, I feel more free to take them spontaneously and the permission becomes implied as the relationship builds as with this one of Mr R I took this week after I gave him some strawberries from my garden.

In this case I was really only semi-alone. The kids were in the car when I pulled over to talk to him.  Although I suggest that at times I do not ask, in this case I did, out of habit.  The kids stayed in the car for the five minutes we talked and I snapped the shots and told him he had to eat the strawberries today. They were soft and would mold fast in the summer heat and humidity. By the time I got back to the car and waved, he'd taken my advise and was fast at work. 

I have a hard time judging the photograps themselves, but I've no doubt the relationships growing out of this practice are interesting.  

Mr. R didn't like one of the pictures I took last time. He felt self conscious of how old he felt he looked. 


When this time I told him he had a nice face, he smiled.  I meant it and I hope he could tell.

The Story Writes Itself

Today I met a politician from New York State who came down to check out the oil spill and was shocked, as I was when I first came down, that New Orleans is still reeling from Katrina. When I shared with him that five years after Katrina New Orleans still doesn't have its major trauma center rebuilt he was as shocked as I was at the close of my conversation with the Tulane faculty I met with earlier in the week. Most of the time I've been here I've spent talking to the residents in the lower 9th ward where there are entire blocks growing back in weeds. It's impossible not to read the truth embedded in the landscape: the areas hardest hit by Katrina are the last ones being rebuilt.

Even so, just fifteen minutes away, ensconsed in the Garden District apartment I rented, it's easy to forget the reality of the lower 9th ward. On Sunday I went to Branch Baptist Church where they announced the opening of a new diner where I joined a family for breakfast after the service. They shared more stories of how hard it was to move back to the neighborhood after Katrina. The residents didn't feel they were adequately helped. And it seems reasonable to me to have expected not to pay to have utilities restored or not to have to make a deposit if you had never made one before. One family said it cost them nearly a thousand dollars to have the utility services turned back on because Entergy removed all the meters from the houses on their block.Why our tax dollars, our raised insurance premiums, our FEMA monies didn't cover these expenses, I will never understand.

And there's Mac at the Lower 9th Ward Village, a grass roots organization. He's out teaching people how to get to the other side of fear one conversation at a time. Without the infusion of large sums of money from business leaders and big-name non profits, the community continues its own grass roots efforts to rebuild.There's still no major grocery store in the neighborhood and the Circle Grocery Store, a busy African-American owned business before Katrina on Clairborne Ave remains closed. An enterprising family now uses the shaded entry-way to the store to sell fresh fruits and vegetables.

King Ronald Lewis

Allen Kimball went with me to interview the owner of the Museum of Dance and Feathers. I got a history lesson from the King himself. I also got a lesson in comporting myself professionally as a photographer, a very gentle reminder to ask before turning on my recording equipment and taking pictures. I've been trying to be less timid over time, but today I was reminded that it is possible also to be too bold.

My host was incredibly gracious and gentle while I repeatedly tried to get a grip on the local definitions of family and church which overlap almost entirely with social aid and pleasure clubs, and which are all really "just"--as if "just" had long enough arms to embrace such a place--at any rate, "just" community. Here community is a set of networks bleeding into each other. It is a network of families and churches, many descendants of sugar cane and cotton farmers from Mississippi and rural Louisiana. They have shared blood lines and brought a tradition of gardening to the city before urban gardening. King Lewis said, "Here, it's just gardening."  He calls himself the pied piper of his family, drawing people back from where they scattered after Katrina. He sees himself as the pulse of the community that won't quit beating.

Bundles of Bricks, Stacks of Wood, Lengths of Pipe

This was my favorite scene today. At first I thought these were new bricks, but when I started exploring I realized they were the remains of of a house in the process of being salvaged. The light at the end of the day had that quality I always feel at a loss to describe. Is this Vermeer's light? And whose clouds then? Whose sky?

Tupelo Street

Tupelo Street runs perpendicular to St. Claude. It's an arterial with a green medial that looks like it had some nice houses and businesses on it. There's people moving back and pouring slabs here and there. There's a trailer on one corner and then there's the houses that they are taking apart to salvage the components: brinks, lumber, fence posts. If it ain't going up it's busy coming down. This is Tyrone. He's rebuilding and has all the pictures of his house as it came down and now he's getting ready to put up 8 ft columns to keep this one from floating away next time the Gulf water's misbehave in his direction.

Charity Hospital

Five years post Katrina, Charity Hospital remains closed. There are lots of folks who want to see it reopen. Here is a youtube to Save Charity Hospital.com link to explain some of the issues. And here is the link to the Save Charity Hospital Organization that made it.

Here are some pictures of what the site looks like now:

Back in New Orleans

I'm back in New Orleans now and spent my first full day out looking for the people I photographed. I found some and started giving back the photos I took. And, of course, one things leads to another. Before I knew it I was taking more. The highlights of the day were a driving tour with Allen Kimball who took me through parts of the lower 9th and showed me places like Fats Domino's house, and then the Treme. He introduced me to Sandos (not Santos) who goes by the name Sam, a former Marine in Veitnam who told the story of his house being hit by the wall of water when the levee broke. He was caught in the attick and part of his face was torn off.  With his his mouth and his hands he said, " I'll never forget those two nail."

I also met with Joseph (not Joe) Peters at St. Claude Tire. I got the official poster from the joint and I have a date to go back and take more pictures of him and the people who work and spend time there. And I made a date with Jermica, the girl who went out shooting with me in April, to go back out in the Lower 9th and take more. I'm going to keep plenty busy. I need a recipe for making time multiply like rabbits. Any suggestions other than black magic?