Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Trumpet, Preservation Hall, New Orleans

As promised, the final image of the low light blur jazz player triptych from Preservation Hall, 1990.

More than 18 years has past since this photograph was taken and I wonder if he is still playing? Is he still alive? Is he still a member of the Preservation Hall band? Knowing that this was taken around Easter of 1990, an expert on the band’s long history could probably tell me who he is and answer these questions. Me, I’m feeling the noeme of Roland Barthes: all I know is that “That has been“.

12/8/2008, Addition: Ron left a comment to say that this is a photograph of Wendell Brunious and that he is currently living in Sweden but may return to New Orleans. You can learn more about the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at their web site: http://www.preservationhall.com/home.php; if you are visiting New Orleans, Preservation Hall is a must see.

Trombone, Preservation Hall, New Orleans

Second of three low light blur jazz player images from Preservation Hall, 1990. One more to come in the next post and then I’ll add some new images made this morning.

Clarinet, Preservation Hall, New Orleans

Sometimes I move the camera to create motion blur, sometimes the subject does it for me. The lighting in jazz venues is rarely bright but, in 1990 at least, there was little more than a couple of table lamps in Preservation Hall, New Orleans; with Kodachrome 64 in the camera the blur of the musician’s movement was as inevitable as it was welcome.

Female mannequin, New Orleans, 1990

The sadness of this mannequin’s resigned expression, her beauty, her baldness, and especialy her mutilation, all ask larger and more disturbing questions than whether I like the clothes she is displaying. A young women with a shaved head suggests cancer and concentration camps; the slice through her right eye, parallel with her elegant collar, speaks of abuse, misogyny and rape in the heart our ‘civilized’ society.

And that’s just one photograph of one store. Sometimes beautiful, often sensual or erotic, occasionally sinister and disturbing, always, always surreal: store windows offer a chorus of mixed messages waiting to be noticed. These windows are frozen one scene plays, unconsciously assembled in small theatres by store managers and window dressers. They are commentaries on us, on our society and culture. They are mirrors, literally and metaphorically, for looking at ourselves and who we are.

Store windows have been a long running theme in my photography (you never have to travel far to find one); you can see more in the Store Life Revisited selection of my main Web site.