L. Kasimu Harris: Capturing the Soul of the South

My girlfriend in graduate school looked like a video vixen. An Alabama native, she was vice president at a bank holding company in Nashville. She loved soul food, the Crimson Tide college football team and fine linen. My dad called her ‘the catch’. It was 2008, and the US was in the grip of the Great Recession. I lost my job on a rinky-dink newspaper in rural Louisiana and moved back in with my parents in New Orleans. Back on the job market with two degrees, as a writer who is deft with still and moving images, I only managed to garner gainful employment gutting houses. ‘The catch’ flourished: a homeowner, ascendent in her career. We didn’t realize it, but we had reached an impasse in our relationship.

A beaming day in January 2009, far more spring than winter, was the catalyst. A brass band’s tunes filled the air, as the Perfect Gentlemen Social Aid & Pleasure Club Second Line approached, whilst folk from the community strutted down Louisiana Avenue in New Orleans. Members of the club wore matching black suits with black sashes across their chests that read ‘Perfect Gentleman’ and ‘Dreams Do Come True’. They carried two large handmade fans, trimmed in blue ribbons and adorned with ostrich feathers, which in a bold font declared: ‘OBAMA’.

I took photos as they paraded past Sandpiper Lounge, a Black-owned bar. Although president-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration day was still weeks away, I dreamed that my images would make it into his presidential library. I called ‘the catch’ to excitedly share my experience.

‘Did someone pay you to go and take those photos?’

‘No.’

‘Then, it’s a hobby.’

She was concurrently right and wrong: I was navigating an arduous path of dreams, drive and financial distress. And New Orleans was a sensitive topic. Just four years earlier, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and other parts of the Gulf Coast. At the time, I was enrolled on the Masters of Journalism programme at the University of Mississippi, with dreams of becoming a features writer at a big magazine. Just ten days into the first semester, however, my immediate family evacuated to my unfurnished apartment in Oxford, Mississippi.

I was in D. Michael Cheers’s introduction to photography course, which was a required class. He was my mentor and also a drill sergeant. 45 days after Hurricane Katrina, he took a small group of students to New Orleans to report from the frontlines. I was forced to go – yet it changed my life. I began to document the displacement of people and culture, as well as the changing landscape. Using my camera allowed me to process the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and created an unwavering bond to image-making.

Using my camera allowed me to process the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and created an unwavering bond to image-making.

The next year, I took documentary photography classes with David Wharton, in the ‘Southern Studies’ department. I discovered that the most celebrated practitioners of Southern photography were an abundance of white men and one woman: Sally Mann. Wharton pushed me to read photographs and to exercise deep contemplation before pressing the shutter. However, I was not reflected in the curriculum. I grew up in a predominantly Black city and travelled extensively around the South, where Black brilliance was prevalent. So, I refused to accept that Black people were not making images there. I realized that it was the responsibility of curators, editors and educators to promote a diversity of image-makers and provide a truly accurate representation of the region.

One aspect of my practice is a constant attempt to reconcile the present with the pre-Katrina New Orleans that lives on in memory. Another is to document parts of the city and cultural traditions that resist gentrification. My series ‘Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges’ (2018–ongoing) is the former. When I was 10, I sat with my mother in Winnah’s Circle, a Black-owned bar, watching my older sister sing with her father’s band. At 17, I played trumpet with Wynton Marsalis during a jam session at Little People’s Place – another venerable, Black-owned establishment. In 2010, after the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl, I celebrated at Sidney’s Saloon on St. Bernard Avenue, a thoroughfare with seven or more Black-owned bars clustered within a few blocks. But by 2017, except for The Other Place, all the Black bars in that Black neighbourhood turned white.

One night in January 2018, armed with my portfolio, published writing and an elevator pitch, I went to the newly white-owned bars. They were all devoid of their Black history. I took a few photos, but interview requests were rebuffed. Undeterred, I walked into The Other Place and saw my reflection: Black. I started preserving the narratives of those people, places and their ephemera: New Orleans Saints schedules from Bud Light; adverts for Martell brandy; fliers for bus trips to places in and out of Louisiana. It’s work that I consider to be in conversation with an older generation of artists, scholars and writers – Roy DeCarava, Langston Hughes, Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston – who all documented things now deemed fundamental to the African diaspora and the American experience.

Despite the importance of white male figures such as William Christenberry, William Eggleston and Walker Evans, this region is far more than the sum of their work.

I assumed my efforts to raise awareness – including essays in The New York Times (2020) and Stranger’s Guide (2022), plus exhibitions at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh (2020) and the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette (2022), among numerous others – would save these Black establishments.

Yet, over the past six years in New Orleans, the numbers have dwindled. Silky’s Bar remains Black facing, but is now white owned, while the venerable Purple Rain Bar has shuttered. Sandpiper Lounge – with its iconic neon-green sign that dates back to the 1950s, and was featured in the Ray Charles biopic, Ray (2004) – is also closed. I’m not working in vain: people are realizing that these institutions are epicentres of culture, places of respite and community.

In the latest iteration of ‘Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges’, which will be shown at Prospect.6, I expanded the project to encompass an international perspective – with watering holes from Chicago, Clarksdale, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Afterwards, I’ll continue to spread the gospel of saving Black-owned bars, as one of 13 featured artists in ‘New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging’ at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition will explore four cities whose life, creativity and connection have existed longer than the nation states where they are presently situated: Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans and Mexico City.

One of my mentors, the artist and photographer Dawoud Bey, gave me some invaluable advice in 2018, when I felt snubbed for not being included in ‘New Southern Photography’ at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. The show’s curators, Richard McCabe and Bradley Sumrall, asked me to write an essay for the catalogue. Petulantly, I almost declined. Bey couched it as an honour to write about your peers. I accepted the commission. While studying the exhibition images, I perpetually returned to RaMell Ross’s work. My essay, ‘The Dismantling of Southern Photography’ (2018), examined his practice re-envisioning the South. It was a counterargument of my graduate school discovery: the dearth of diversity of celebrated Southern photographers. Despite the importance of white male figures such as William Christenberry, William Eggleston and Walker Evans, this region is far more than the sum of their work. ‘New Southern Photography’ featured work by queer artists, women and people of colour – a true representation of the South.

Ross is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. Over the years, we’ve shared libations and conversations. In 2022, he asked me to be the stills photographer for his latest film, Nickel Boys (2024), an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s eponymous 2019 novel. Ross co-wrote and directed the film. He sought images different from traditional movie stills and encouraged me to deploy my full visual vocabulary. Ross and I both understand how the figurative can be contemplated through the lens of abstraction. Seeing deeply and differently are paramount to our practices.

I’ve always viewed New Orleans as international, even when editors and other creatives argued differently.

On set, I observed him transform ugly truths about the South into something beautiful, at one point explaining to a roomful of mostly background actors the significance of a particular scene as it related to police brutality: how Black boys were not allowed to become men. Ross’s description rang painfully true. I grew up in New Orleans during the 1980s and ’90s, with its corrupt police department, mostly inadequate school system and proliferation of crime – it was a city in which too many Black men didn’t grow old.

‘The catch’ once told me I was bigger than New Orleans, and my career trajectory would be limited if I focused solely on its narratives. But I’ve always viewed New Orleans as international, even when editors and other creatives argued differently. In the end, I didn’t marry ‘the catch’. I do, however, remain happily wedded to storytelling. To me, this city has an abundance of cultural riches, beautiful landscapes and remarkable, resilient people. I am who I am despite New Orleans. I am who I am because of New Orleans.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 247 with the headline ‘When the Spirit Moves’

L. Kasimu Harris is included in ‘Prospect 6: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home’, on view at Sweet Lorraine's Jazz Club, New Orleans from 2 November – 2 February 2025

^{Main image: L. Kasimu Harris, ‘Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges’ series (detail), New Orleans, 2018–ongoing. Courtesy: the artist}