Coming soon to local bookstores and Amazon, New Orleans by New Orleans. New Orleans by New Orleans is a complex portrait of a beautiful city, presented through the eyes of its own community. It is is a published collection of stories inspired by the city of New Orleans, written by the people who know it. This is NOT a “Why I Love New Orleans” promotional informercial. It goes deeper to show an authentic and complex perspective of a fascinating, soulful and beautiful place.

The piece to the left is Many to Never Return from the 2005 series Our City is Gone. I was fresh to Wisconsin and, on the other side of the country, my home was washing away. I used prints from the 2001 Mardi Gras season and emails from a friend in exile to create four pieces about strength, loss, hope and home. As a photographer, I don't get to do a lot of handwork, but creating handwritten text in a pattern to finish each image was incredibly therapeutic. I never exhibited them.

New Orleans by New Orleans is the latest installment in Book by Authors, a community book program established by Smolarcorp in 2006.

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The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” My work deals specifically with how we, as a culture, become women (and men) and what from our shared and unique histories - interpretations of literature, family artifacts, or the community of people in which we were raised - have had part in the shaping of those roles.

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