Pictures From The Bayou

Bayou Lafourche slowly drains down one hundred miles from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico in southeast Louisiana and is dotted with small towns and backwoods "brulees" (brue-lays). From 1975 to 1982 I photographed the deep Cajun, African American, and Creole culture of "down the bayou" people and with an eye out for the bizarre and incongruous in everyday life. This small selection is part of an archive of two-thousand images from that period. I photographed exclusively in black and white 35mm and printed on the glorious (and no longer available) Portriga 111. I continue to print in silver and maintain a high resolution digital archive of both my early work and new film-based imagery, produced in-house with two dedicated camera-scanning stations. Black and white film's ability to transport the artist dramatically into the tangible realm of analog photographic practice is the high to which I am addicted. Rick Olivier