September 13th, 2005 - A few weeks prior to Hurricane Katrina, I completed this photo project with the intent of displaying the images in a New Orleans gallery. Clearly that's not going to happen any time soon. When I evacuated my now-flooded house, these photos were among the few possessions that I saved. I look at the images now and realize with some despair what's been lost. New Orleans has been my adopted home for a total of ten years, and for the most part it's been an experience that has enriched my life enormously. While the city certainly had its share of problems prior to Katrina, the good has always outweighed the bad, elegance has always balanced out crassness, and a general attitude of tolerance has always won out over bigotry and close-mindedness. Now that the city has been reshaped by this disaster, I'm left wondering if the quirkiness of its people and the physical charm of the landscape will be irreparably harmed. I look at these images now and feel privileged to have been witness to the pre-Katrina New Orleans. I can only hope that the diaspora will reverse over the next few months to reinvigorate this beloved and beleaguered town.
THE "GREETINGS FROM NEW ORLEANS" PROJECT
From June 20th to July 23rd, 2005, I developed a series of original images from my archive of New Orleans and Mardi Gras photos. I turned the 4x6 images into glossy, professional-grade postcards and provided each with a message from a fictitious sender to a fictitious recipient. Each card starts with the phrase "Greetings from New Orleans". The various messages were intended to be both personal and provocative, to elicit a range of emotion from sympathy to disgust. A newlywed writes home about her decadent honeymoon, a recently released Angola inmate writes to an old girlfriend for help, a visiting Army Corps Engineer exclaims that the city is doomed should a big storm hit it directly, a bigot complains to a friend about all the gays ruining the French Quarter, etc, etc, etc.
33 unique postcards were generated. Each was addressed to a single locale in Ohio, stamped, and copied three times for a total of 99 cards. I then proceeded to intentionally "lose" them all over the city of New Orleans. As discreetly as possible, I littered the cards on park benches, cafe tables, bookstore aisles, sidewalks, restaurant entrances, park tracks, and a variety of other high traffic areas. My hope was that a few of the postcards would be found, puzzled over, perhaps giggled at, and then conscientiously deposited in the nearest mailbox. After all, isn't that the "right" thing to do when you come across a letter that is clearly wayward? How could a person pass up such an easy opportunity to do a good deed?
By addressing all 99 cards to my contacts in Ohio I was able to eventually regain custody of the "rescued" images. I assume the rest of them are either at the dump or on the submerged refrigerators of "found art" afficianados. In the end, of the 99 "lost" postcards, a surprising 53 of them found their way into a mailbox, solid proof that the much-maligned people of New Orleans aren't so bad after all.
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Inspiration Addendum: I'd like to thank Sarah Mann, a Milwaukee-based jeweler and good friend, for inspiring the idea behind this project. Also, the late great Stanley Milgram, social psychologist extraordinaire, who developed and used the "lost letter" technique as a tool for measuring kindness behaviours of a community.
Justin Lundgren (lundgrenjm@hotmail.com)
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Prints will be limited as follows:
Each 4x6 image limited to 100
Each 8x11.5 image limited to 75
Each 11x17 image limited to 50
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For those of you in Martha's Vineyard over the week of July 17th to July 22nd, the Greetings from New Orleans Project will be on view as part of the Vineyard Gumbo Festival which benefits several New Orleans-based non-profits. See more information on the Vineyard Gumbo Festival at Vineyard Gumbo.
