Last week I ran around the streets of New Orleans with Meryt and Sarah, my newfound colleagues, and we spent most of our time engaged in a documentary project on the homeless. During the next few weeks, I'll write more about that experience and share some more of my work and the encounters with street life in the Big Easy and the homeless...their dignity, their kindness, their addictions, their demons.
My work last week left a deep impression as most formative rituals tend to do.
On one particular day my colleagues and I had lunch at Cafe Reconcile, an in-house academic training restaurant for inner-city youth. The food was great and knowing that profits were going to a great cause felt even better. Along with the memories of a debris-style roast beef po' boy, I will recall a simple note card near my place setting. It had a quote from Henry David Thoreau: Things don't change, we change. Those words have followed me back home to the DC area.
Midweek, our documentary project was part or a more comprehensive nightly exhibit at the Lost Love Lounge in the Bywater area of town. The morning of the exhibit Andy Levin was editing our slideshow and as he typed my surname on the title slide, he inadvertently spelled: M-a-r-t-i. I paused and then corrected him, but he insisted that as an artist and as a photographer I should consider spelling it in this manner. So I agreed. Along with the more profound transformations engendered by the social documentary project, I also found myself confronting seemingly minor and unintended orthographic refinements.
A portion of my contribution to the overall project is scheduled to be published online in the near future in a well-known online magazine. I'll let you know when it comes out. In the meantime I will share some of my other experiences of that week, bit by bit and post by post. Some light-hearted, and some not.
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