



1 / 11 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Chandra McCormick Prisoners going to work, 2004.

A few years ago, I was on a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival titled “Writing New Orleans: The Most Exotic place in America.” It was held in the largest room in the hotel where the annual literary festival is held, and the room was packed. This surprised me but shouldn’t have: people in New Orleans can be counted on to show an interest in New Orleans.

My co-panelists were Nathaniel Rich, the New Orleans-based novelist and journalist; Kim Marie Vaz, a dean at Xavier University and the author of a book on the Baby Dolls, a women’s Mardi Gras organization; and Richard Campanella, the Tulane geographer and historian. After a lively panel discussion there was a Q. & A., at the end of which Jackie Clarkson, a longtime city-council member (and the mother of the actress Patricia Clarkson) took the microphone. She delivered a brief speech about the glory of New Orleans—how it was the greatest city in the world.

Her remarks sounded to me like they were intended to sum up of the preceding discussion. I didn’t like the tidiness of the sentiment. When she was done, I leaned forward to the microphone in front of me and, almost to my own astonishment, said: “Hearing those words of praise for New Orleans makes me think of something that Stanley Moss, a poet I know, told me just before I moved down here. ‘New Orleans,’ he declared in his sonorous poet’s voice, ‘stinks of slavery.’ When I got here, I looked around and decided that this was not the case at all. If anything, race relations seemed more friendly than in the North. But the longer I am here, the more I see his point.”

Immediately, most of the audience members went into bobblehead motion, half nodding vigorously in agreement, the other half shaking their heads. A wave of murmuring swept over the room. A few minutes later, the panel was adjourned. People crowded up to the table where we sat, some to praise my words, others to damn them. “You have it all wrong. Have you seen ‘The Princess and the Frog’?” one said, with a completely straight face, referring to Disney’s fairy-tale movie. “New Orleans is exactly like that!”

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick’s photographs from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which were taken between 1980 and 2013, are a subset of their work in the same way that the prison is a kind of annex to the world of New Orleans. The prison farm, which is commonly known as Angola, is the country’s largest maximum-security prison, in a state that imprisons more people per capita than any other in the United States. Situated a hundred and forty miles northwest of New Orleans, the prison was taken over by the state in 1901, having been founded, twenty years before, on land consolidated from several cotton and sugarcane plantations, the largest of which was named Angola, after the country its slaves came from.

From the beginning, it was a brutal, for-profit farming operation, a system in some ways reminiscent of slavery, but with less incentive to keep the workers alive. Since the prison’s current warden, Burl Cain, took over, in 1995, Angola has become a less violent place, with a reputation for reform and a faintly entrepreneurial aura. It is known today for an on-site museum and for a biannual prison rodeo, begun fifty years ago and professionalized in recent decades, which draws thousands of visitors a year. But the prison still draws controversy for its use of solitary confinement, among other things: recent lawsuits filed in Louisiana courts allege that Angola’s inmates receive inadequate medical care and that inmates on death row are subjected to unsafe temperatures .

Calhoun and McCormick are a husband-and-wife team who have been taking pictures together for decades. According to Calhoun, the marriage had its genesis in the act of photography. “She kept brushing up on me in that darkroom,” he once joked when asked how they met. They are based in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and their work documents the lives of African-Americans in that neighborhood, in the nearby Treme, and elsewhere in Louisiana.

Some of Calhoun and McCormick’s photographs were damaged during Katrina (or, as some New Orleanians would prefer that disaster to be called, The Federal Flood of 2005.) The couple stored the photos in plastic tubs and placed the tubs on top of tables, in case the house flooded. They expected to be back home in days. Instead, they were gone for ten weeks. The pictures were ruined. When Calhoun and McCormick started to throw them away, however, their son pointed out that the images, transfigured and obscured, where still beautiful in a way. “The water had left swirling patterns of color on some of the transparencies, and the spots of mold on some of the prints looked quite beautiful if you looked past what had been lost,” Rollo Romig wrote in a piece about the photographers on this site, in 2010.

A show of the flood-damaged works in New Orleans brought Calhoun and McCormick recognition that has only grown since. Their Angola series, which they titled “The Prison Industrial Complex,” was exhibited as part of the Prospect 3 biennial, in New Orleans, last October. At the biennial’s opening-night party, I remember seeing Franklin Sirmans, the artistic director of the event, embrace Okwui Enwezor, who had been named the curator of the Venice Biennale, and who has made his name curating art work with a strong documentary component. Somewhere in that handshake between two art-world tastemakers—one African-American, from New York City; the other African, from Nigeria—the work of Calhoun and McCormick must have been passed along. “The Prison Industrial Complex” was exhibited at the Venice Biennale this past spring. It’s odd to think of the photos travelling, as images do, and being exhibited in the context of international fine art, whose anodyne white walls have the same negating effect as an airport.

Calhoun and McCormick have photographed many of the traditions and events for which New Orleans is known: the Mardi Gras Indian parades, the musicians, the street life, and on and on. The images from Angola seem to echo across those other, happier images, and to leave a troubling trace on them. When “The Prison Industrial Complex” was exhibited in at Prospect 3, the photos were presented along with excerpts from essays by the activists Assata Shakur and Angela Davis. Davis’s essay began: