Relics 2015: Just a Memory

For reporter Tommy Comeaux, a day’s drive across Pointe Coupee Parish starts as a work assignment … until someone else takes the wheel in an unexpected direction.

“I’ve always said we all have a twelve-year-old who lives inside us,” said Comeaux, who has worked as photographer and editor at the Pointe Coupee Banner since 1999. “People who know me well will say I let that inner child out too often, but I don’t think that’s possible.”

When an old concrete grain elevator was being demolished at the Port of Pointe Coupee, Comeaux and his camera were sent north on LA-1 every other week to document the months-long process. The kid came out often. “Let’s see where this road goes! And on we go …” laughed Comeaux.

“South Louisiana is just littered with these beautiful old places,” he added. The photographer of thirty-something years has a penchant for abandoned places, often taking “photo safaris” in the area with his daughter. “Old barns, sharecropper houses. If I can find out who owns a place, I call and ask permission. Lord knows I don’t wanna end up at the wrong end of a shotgun.”

The sharecropper’s cabin pictured here was a favorite of Comeaux’s before the grain elevator assignment. Shifting seasons and light bring him back to his pet subjects; when he stopped on this day, it was for autumn’s burnish on the tallow trees behind the house. “It adds character,” said Comeaux. “Makes it almost irresistible.”

Headed out to the port a few months later, Comeaux glanced roadside at Lettsworth for a sighting of the cabin. “What I found, much to my dismay, was a smoldering pile of ash and twisted tin,” said Comeaux. The farmer who owned the cabin believes vandals were to blame. For Comeaux, the incident enforced a personal adage. “I tell photographers again and again—the time to take a photo is when you see it.”

Find more of Comeaux’s work at facebook.com/TommyComeauxPhotography. Details here on joining “Relics,” our yearlong photography series.