Before the lockdowns I liked to go out at night and take pictures in the French Quarter of essentially, loneliness.  After the lockdowns everything changed and loneliness seemed to be all around me.  Strangely it became harder for me to take the pictures I wanted to take.  I’m not sure of all the reasons why but a change was in order.

On my night walks I noticed that all the boarded up storefronts had graffiti on their boarded up windows and doors.  I figured it wouldn’t last long so I took pictures of them.  I know I didn’t get them all, and many I got to too late to capture before someone decided to put their own mark over them.  Still, I caught a bunch of them.

I don’t know much about their back story, why they were done, who did them, or even what happened to all the plywood.  It does seem like the city came in at some point and supported the project, or at least a version of it.  The city version felt a little, “weak” to me.  It didn’t feel organic, it felt forced.  It didn’t feel like they got actual graffiti artists, everything felt stale and safe.  Good effort I guess.

The times were strange. There was also a lot of social unrest, which is to be expected. Some of the graffiti went into a more social statement, and that was also as much a reflection of the time as anything else was.

Anyway, here is a collection of what I did take pictures of.  Some might be repeats of different versions.

I don’t know if I’ve ever posted many of these.  Originally it felt weird to post them, pictures of someone else’s art.  Now I look at them as historical.  I did send them as postcards at one point.  If you got one of those it was probably a 1 of 1 postcard as each person got a different work of graffiti.

Here they all are in one collection though.  I really thought there were more, and maybe there are more somewhere, but they really got me to thinking.  I’ve said before that there are no real bad pictures, just pictures waiting to mature.  I know that’s not completely true, but I do believe that history makes great pictures even out of the most mundane things.  I wasn’t trying to take great pictures, or artistic ones, I was just trying to capture the work being done.  Enjoy.

-Renso Amariz-