“Best known for his unique studio portraits of the Mardi Gras Indians, Christopher Porché West has emerged as one of the best of New Orleans’ photographers. His work is marked by warmth, passion, and impact, and by an impeccable care for detail.”
– Gary Esolen, New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation
The Collector’s Print of the Month [...]
It’s difficult to try to describe a town like New Orleans. It really is more like a town and not a city – a town and community of all types of people. And a community of communities. It would be easy to stereotype this town as being simply the Vieux Carré, or Bourbon Street. Or [...]
If you ask the Mardi Gras Indian where the ideas for his patch designs come from, you’ll get some kind of vague and not too informative answer: “It just comes from in my head.” But, if the Indian likes you and he trusts you, he’ll tell you about his dream or his vision. It may [...]
I went where I wasn’t supposed to go. To beat the summer doldrums of New Orleans, I ventured off to Cuba with little more in mind than making some new character studies. I traveled around the island seeking photographs that told some basic truths about the people of our Spanish-speaking neighbor, and observed a stymied, [...]
In the summer of 2000 I ventured to Haiti as part of a small humanitarian aid mission based in New Orleans called the American Haitian Development Association. We started our trip in Port-au-Prince and ventured to the small mountainous village, La Vallée de Jacmel, which is an area just up a ten-mile dirt road from [...]
Each photograph is exhibited in found materials that usually originate from deteriorating homes and facades from throughout New Orleans. I recycle scraps of wrought iron, aged cypress and window frames into one-of-a-kind ensembles that provide the perfect context through which to view the images. Harvesting the old antique distressed wood provides an intrinsically unique and [...]
