New Orleans : Driven
New Orleans : Driven is an ongoing project I initiated in 2017 when I began traversing the city by car as part of a side hustle making deliveries. I found myself seeing the old well-travelled routes in a new light and discovering new nooks and crannies of a city with so many textural and complicated stories to tell. I began making sure I always carried a camera or two next to me on the passenger seat.
Gradually, what began as an unconscious instinct to street photography became something a little bit different. Because the job I was doing required that I keep moving, there was none of the studied deliberation of staking out a photogenic street scene and patiently waiting for the perfect shot to appear. Shots were made while passing by, often, or stopped at a traffic light. Additionally, the job took me to parts of the city I wouldn’t ordinarily look for “interesting” subjects. My favorite images from the series are a result of this spontaneous and arbitrary sense of place.
In addition to my workhorse digital cameras, the other component of the project involved shooting with an assortment of vintage and plastic analog cameras. This served a utilitarian purpose, in some regard, since a simple pinhole camera loaded with film does not require complicated settings to be made before making a shot. But more than that, I love the unsharp democracy of the general focus that you get from this medium.