A girl broke Frank Relle’s heart, but a city captured it.

He was bouncing back from a soured romance his freshman year at Tulane, around the same time his best friend was hurt in a car accident. Together, they went on long walks in their corner of New Orleans.

“We recovered from our respective illnesses walking around the Garden District and making up stories about the houses we saw,” Mr. Relle recalled. “It got me thinking about how you could use the house as a backdrop to the personality of those inside and get at the theater of their lives.”

It would not be until 2004 — after “I had been fired by everybody I worked for” — that he returned to his hometown and started “New Orleans Nightscapes,” a series of long-exposure pictures of everything from grand manses to shotgun shacks. The images glow with a moody mix of colors, each one hinting at the dramas and routines played out inside. Small wonder one of those images was used as the cover for “Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans,” by Dan Baum, who tells the city’s story through characters and storms.

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The range of homes — from luxe to louche — reflects his family’s own experiences. His great-great-grandfather had come to New Orleans from Sicily in 1898, settling on the West Bank area by the Mississippi River. His own parents raised him in the North Shore by Lake Pontchartrain. As a child, he enjoyed the good life, before his father lost it all.

“I was riding fancy horses that pranced,” he said. “When his business went bad, the next thing I knew, I was working in a cemetery with a guy named Pee Wee telling me about a whole different type of life he knew versus what I had growing up.”

Later, though his dorm mates at Tulane considered him a local, Mr. Relle said his suburban upbringing made him more of an outsider. Yet even as he worked his way through college waiting tables in the French Quarter, tourists looked to him for advice on what to see. Those experiences — and his broken heart — led him to explore and learn about the city around him.

He started the project almost by accident in 2004, when he was showing someone how to do a long-exposure at night. He liked what he saw and started to pursue it, going around in his grandmother’s Lincoln Town Car, at first using available street light, or plugging his lighting rig into an outlet while the home’s owner was asleep.

He has since gotten a lot more technical, with a lighting truck that he uses, as well as getting permission from the homeowners and the help of the police to close down streets.

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He had barely begun the project when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, forcing him to crash with Chris Callis, his mentor in New York. He was dejected, thinking the project was doomed to end early. One day, he had a conversation with Charles Traub, a professor at the School of Visual Arts.

“I thought the project had been done,” Mr. Relle said. “But Charles told me: ‘No, the story of those houses is just beginning. You’ve got to go back.’ The hurricane actually extended the life of this project and my understanding of it as well. It broadened my view of New Orleans, taking me to places I had not been before.”

In some cases, it is hard to tell which images were done after Katrina. Weather and time had already nipped away at some of the homes he had photographed before the storm. Others, afterward, looked solid.

What the series aims to do, he said, is to present a view of the city beyond the much-photographed scenes familiar to most (not an easy task in a city with so many historic buildings). To help viewers see beyond that, he wants the houses he photographs to serve as a backdrop to discussions about who lives there and how.

“There are no people in my photos, but they are all character sketches of the people I grew up with,” he said. “I want to make things that encapsulate that and are able to communicate that not in explicit terms, but giving people access and letting them create their own narratives.”

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Frank Relle is currently curating a photography exhibit about Louisiana sponsored by the United States Embassy in Moscow. The show will open in mid-May at the Multimedia Museum House of Photography in Moscow.

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