“Mr. West’s honesty with the camera reflects his own personal convictions and his honesty with the people with whom he works manifest in their trust towards him.”
– Kenneth Owen, University of New Orleans Library, Louisiana Collection
Throughout the intervening years, my curiosity concerning New Orleans’ culture transformed into a passionate mission to capture in photo-documentary the beauty and dignity of a people whose cultural traditions are being overwhelmed by the pressures of modern society. I am hopeful that this documentary process will stimulate further support for the “life force” within these “origin” communities. I seek to preserve for our future the distinct visions and traditions for use by historians, writers and the culturally curious.
Through the work I also aim to uncover the essence or soul of both peoples and persons. My philosophical interests in photography are to find threads that bind peoples of different backgrounds who collectively are sustained by faith in life itself. In each personal visage there is a connection with its origins, its sense of faith, its practices in crafts and arts, in human relations, in healing and meditation, which reflect that faith. In some ways photographic depictions are like the true existentialists, they “live in the moment.” Thus, they are released from the burden of the past and without the fear of the future. Faces are approachable, for they hold something that invites reflection, and by looking into their “hearts” there is a lightness and a grace we might all emulate. The ultimate puzzle is that photographic visages hold the history of a people and the feelings in their hearts. We discover how they all fit together while we honor how each piece is not like any other.
Over time I came to feel that flat photographs fail to achieve the richness and dimensionality of photographic sculpture. Though a framed photograph can tell a good story, a photograph “housed” in sculpture gives a more nuanced and deeper narrative. This gave birth to the creative process behind the assemblage: an artful expression that exists at the nexus of photography and sculpture, the point where photography and sculpture converge.
Dramatic and thought-provoking images are “housed” within salvaged architectural elements adorned with provocative, symbolic objects. This salvaged architectural debris – door casings, flooring, window frames, knobs and pulls – gives the photograph a sense of place, an authenticity that comes from being at home in the soul of an artist’s works. The net effect is additive; the sum is greater than the parts. Photographs incorporated within sculpture deepen the meaning and message of the art.
The assemblages are cultural “curatorialism” masked as art. The simple behaviors and beliefs of ordinary people are universal and easily understood. Religious faith, death and burial rituals, celebration and suffering are comprehended, if not shared, by all humanity. To see one’s own emotions in the face of a Haitian child or the hands of an elderly woman in New Orleans is to be reminded that that which binds us together is greater than that which divides us.
We are in essence, one.
- Christopher Porché West
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