THE BANK OF SOUL Flickr archive
|
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Christopher Porché West is an award‐winning photographer and artist who has been documenting the people and culture of News Orleans for 30 years. A native Californian with Franco‐European roots in Louisiana, Porché West first came to New Orleans in the late 1970’s on a fellowship from the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was during this period when he began forming the major focus of his artistic career – New Orleans’ Franco‐Creole culture – by researching the antebellum era "Les Gens de Couleur Libres" or free people of color. Captivated by the city, he returned in 1981 to undertake a self‐directed photo‐documentary on the daily lives and cultural activity of contemporary New Orleans Creoles of Color and African Americans, including the elaborate costumes of Mardi Gras Indians, passing rites, community occurrences, neighborhood scenes and jazz funerals. These photographic surveys led to the development of a permanent exhibit for the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve Visitor Center in the Vieux Carré. Between 1985 and 1994 he maintained a commercial photographic studio in Newport Beach, California serving a wide array of clients, including design firms, architects, advertising agencies, manufacturers and corporations, by contributing to their marketing and related collateral production needs. While working as a commercial photographer, he also self‐published a series of lithographic reproductions, “Eloquent Visages”, which included selected members of the Black Mardi Gras Indian tribes of New Orleans and cameo portraits, which are still currently in distribution.
In 1995 he returned to and settled in New Orleans, and established a temporary studio to accommodate solely formal portraiture in a controlled environment for individual members of many different tribes of the Black Mardi Gras Indians. In all, 40 different Indians were persuaded to collaborate in the effort: the first and only time that the Indians themselves were part of the process of their own documentation. After years of photographing this colorful local culture, his artwork made its debut at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1996 and was featured there for the following 12 years. Approaching his third decade as a professional photographer, Porché West began exploring new mediums of creative expression, while also expanding the thematic focus of his work beyond New Orleans’ Franco‐Creole culture. Recycling scraps of wrought iron, aged cypress, window frames and other found materials from the streets of New Orleans, Porché West began creating handcrafted, one‐of‐a‐kind ensembles through which to view his imagery. These “Assemblages”, three‐dimensional art works that are part photograph and part sculpture, debuted in 1998 at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and in 1999 won the Festival’s Best Display Award in its Contemporary Crafts showcase. The themes and subjects of his photography similarly progressed during this period, leading him to venture abroad. From 1998 to 2000 Porché West thrice traveled to Haiti as part of a humanitarian aid mission sponsored by the New Orleans‐based American Haitian Development Association, where he found further expressions of Franco‐Creole culture while photographing the lives and customs of everyday Haitians. A strong interest in Carnival traditions led him to visit Cuba in 2003 where he documented their Afro‐Latino customs and culture. Two years later he found himself in Liberia, photographing people and places that could have just as easily hailed from communities in Cuba, Haiti, or the bayous of Louisiana. Porché West has been featured in over 40 exhibitions. Most notably, in the summer of 2003 he was singularly selected to commemorate the Louisiana Bicentennial in Paris where he exhibited at the Festival L’esprit Jazz à Saint Germain des Prés. And in 2006 he was one of ten artists statewide who were awarded with the Louisiana Division of the Arts’ prestigious Artist Fellowship. Collections of his work can be found in the archives of the Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Harvard University, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of California at Santa Cruz and San Diego. Porché West currently lives and works in one of New Orleans’ oldest neighborhoods, Bywater, founded in 1809, where he continues to document and preserve the culture and life of New Orleans and its people. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
BE A MEDICI: Support the 'BANK OF SOUL'
Private support of artists by the Medici family facilitated the creation of work by artists that
included Michelangelo, Boticelli, and Gallileo. The Medici commitment to individual artists enabled great art to be made.
500 years later, the world continues to benefit from the fact that these artists had studios, materials, and access to exploration.
You, too, will leave a legacy - please let ART be part of what you leave behind. Your support to the artist permits unfettered creation - and a higher quality of work.
Christopher Porché West has been working as a photographer since 1989. His focus after arriving in New Orleans was to document little of his créole ancestry. “I just saw that the local historical depositores had collected very limited documentation of some my focus areas and subsequently I have donated much of my work to them to help preserve the culture loan my images for use by historians, writers and the culturally curious.”
Your support will keep the studio/gallery on Louisa & Burgundy streets open and running, printing, documenting, and building. It's a revolutionary way to see your affect on the arts - direct support. The risk is low - this is an artist with a solid track record. The return is likely to be stellar. Your committed resources can afford him/the world tremendous results.
Stand Up and Be Counted Upon!
Invoke interest in the Arts and deliver patronage to enrich your experience!
