Visual Perceptions: Art through the lens

Prior to his moving from San Francisco to New Orleans in 1991, photographer Richard Sexton had already begun working on a book about his new home. “It was a metaphor that described the character of New Orleans when I first visited the city in the 90s,” he says of his book, New Orleans Elegance and Decadence. Published in 1993, it was met with acclaim by Times-Picayune book reviewer, Susan Larson, who gave it her “best of the year” award. Director of publications for the Historic New Orleans Collection, Dr. Patricia Brady called it “the best photographic book ever done on the city.” The book also inspired a television feature by noted producer Peggy Scott Laborde. Although fairly new in town, Sexton was already making a name for himself in a storied city where many before had left their artistic and literary mark.

A successful fine art and commercial photographer, Sexton is the author/photographer of many books including Terra Incognita: Photographs of America’s Third Coast; Rosemary Beach; Gardens of New Orleans; Vestiges of Grandeur: The Plantations of Louisiana’s River Road; In the Victorian Style; and The Cottage Book. His work is included in the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. In New Orleans he is represented by A Gallery for Fine Photography in the French Quarter.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1954, Sexton enjoys living in his adopted home town. “The primary inspiration I get from New Orleans is the architecture and the architectural settings,” he revealed during a recent interview from his studio in the Faubourg Marigny just outside the French Quarter. “I respond to the character of the architecture, the way it has aged, and the way it is assembled in the city. We don’t build like this anymore. But we are coming back to it in many ways. It is the same sort of bohemian quality that has inspired so many other people like Tennessee Williams. Mine is not a unique story.”

Since the 1980s, Sexton has enjoyed a second home in Seaside, a New Urbanism community in the Florida panhandle and this experience has inspired numerous photo essays as well as books including Parallel Utopias: The Quest for Community in which he used two planned postwar communities, Sea Ranch in California and Seaside in Florida, as positive examples that were utilized in his critique of the American postwar built environment.

Another book, Rosemary Beach, came our in the spring of 2007 and is an extensive photo essay of the New Urbanism community. Last summer, Sexton’s works were on view at a posh and popular resort near Seaside. The new Ogden WaterColor gallery at WaterColor Inn and Resort in Santa Rosa Beach had an opening exhibition which ended in January 2009 that featured Sexton’s mesmerizing photography of the Gulf Coast.

In the early 90s, shortly after moving to New Orleans, Sexton began making black and white landscape photographs of the Gulf Coast. Over the years, he slowly added to this body of work that began in the coastal regions of Walton County, Florida, and eventually encompassed landscapes in and around New Orleans, in other areas of the Florida panhandle, Georgia, and the Mississippi coast. After fifteen years his body of work was captured in a fine art photography book, Terra Incognita: Photographs of America’s Third Coast, his eighth title with Chronicle Books, released in 2007.

“After hurricane Katrina, I didn’t photograph wrecked houses that most people concentrated on,” he explains. “I photographed the natural landscape, which should be at the forefront of everyone’s attention right now. The coastal erosion has reached a point where we won’t be able to live in South Louisiana in the future,” Sexton says with passion. “The focus of every politician, writer, and journalist should be about that subject.”v Gallery exhibitions and collections of Sexton’s photographs are an outgrowth of his book projects, commissions, and self-assigned projects. “When I came to New Orleans 18 years ago I was a commercial photographer. It has been a long, slow evolution to becoming a fine art photographer,” Sexton reveals. “The primary evolution has been photographing things that other people tell me to photograph as opposed to choosing what I want to photograph.”

For most of the 30 years he has been a working professional, Sexton was committed to a large format view camera photography. Beginning in the late 1990s, he became a pioneering photographer in digital printmaking and then in early 2003 began shooting digitally on a professional basis. Over the last decade he has developed a methodical workflow for digital capture and post-production optimization of digital files, which has enabled his digital capture to rival the image quality of large format film.

“I am a major advocate of digital fine art printmaking,” says Sexton, who gives workshops on the subject and teaches at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. “The technology behind it did not exist even a decade ago. It has become a major force in the art world,” he explains. “The photographer has more control of the images, from the contrast to the color balance and various nuances of the image. They are better controlled by digital printmaking than the traditional process. There is a versatility factor that also comes into play. I can use the same technology for black and white as well as color work. I can do either with the same equipment. Also, digital printmaking makes it much easier to do different scales, including large scale. I like a photograph to be a significant scale in order for it to have an impact on a room.”

Sexton is currently working on a project that “integrates photography from New Orleans and South Louisiana with similar subjects that I am photographing in Latin America,” he explains. “New Orleans shares many commonalities with cities in Latin America. If you go to Latin America you can see places that would make you swear that you were in the French Quarter,” he says. “New Orleans is almost like an island that floated in the continent and moored here. Through my work I am trying to reconnect New Orleans to Latin America. Beyond the visual, there are cultural and culinary relationships as well as religious. I see a really strong connection. Hopefully, it will eventually become a book.”

With more than 200,000 books in print and publication in magazines and newspapers throughout the United States and Europe, Sexton is a noted author who is dedicated to living in and writing about south Louisiana. “What appeals to me is the culture, the very old buildings, and how people are living in them in very creative ways,” he concludes. ✦