Perspectives: L. Kasimu Harris

Years ago, photographer and New Orleans native L. Kasimu Harris was walking near St. Bernard Avenue when he heard the telltale sounds of a second line. “It was like a day that you wouldn’t really expect a second line,” he said. “It was for a birthday party, and the brass band went into this Black bar on St. Bernard.” He followed the music and, enraptured, captured about fifteen seconds of video. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

Fast forward to 2018, when Harris first embarked on his mission of photographically preserving the worlds inside of New Orleans’ Black bars, which he had observed were disappearing in droves. The bar he had followed the second line into was now white-owned and “devoid of any Blackness from its past history”. On top of that, all evidence of the bar’s existence seemed to have been totally erased, even its name. “It had only shuttered like two or three years earlier, and there was no record. Your favorite restaurant in New Orleans that shuts down—it was documented, it was reviewed, there might even be recipes from it. So, it was preserved in a way that will live beyond its ownership. I realized that this hadn’t happened for these Black spaces.”

[Read about New Orleans artist and activist John Taylor's advocacy for the Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle here.]

Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges, currently on exhibition at the Hilliard University Museum in Lafayette, presents Harris’s ongoing project. Curated by Benjamin Hickey, the show peers—through Harris’s intimately-rendered photos—into seven New Orleans Black-owned bars. At Verret’s Lounge, the bric-a-brac behind the bar is presented like a landscape: a beer menu indicated by a row of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Coors Lite, and Abita Amber on shelves beside a portrait of a Black Masking Indian Chief of the Black Mohawks Tribe. In a piece titled “Lawdy,” Big Six Brass Band trumpeter Eric Gordon Jr. wipes his face inside Sportsman’s Corner after playing a second line with the Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Association. At the First and Last Stop Bar, Big Chief of The Wild Magnolias Bo Dollis Jr. raises his hand above his head, snapping and dancing along with tambourine players and drummers—an energetic tension transmitted through the photo as he and the other musicians stretch open their mouths in song. In another image, Mr. Victor, owner of The Other Place Bar, sits at the bartop pensively. In the label, Harris reveals that as the community continues to change, Mr. Victor has said that he is ready to sell.

Harris first conceived of the idea around 2008, inspired primarily by projects like Roy DeCarava’s late twentieth-century portrayals of Harlem and Birney Imes’ 1980s exploration of juke joints in the Mississippi Delta. “Just that unwavering commitment to telling a story about place … I really appreciate that,” said Harris.

"Your favorite restaurant in New Orleans that shuts down—it was documented, it was reviewed, there might even be recipes from it. So, it was preserved in a way that will live beyond its ownership. I realized that this hadn’t happened for these Black spaces.” —L. Kasimu Harris

In a more indulgent study of influence than found in most such exhibitions, Hickey places Harris’s work firmly within the tradition of American documentary photography through a dedicated special section within Vanishing Black Bars, featuring the work of Imes and DeCarava, along with other photographers who have informed Harris’s work, including Keith Calhoun, Chandra McCormick, W. Eugene Smith, Michael P. Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, and Dawoud Bey.

Viewers are encouraged to spend more time with these artists through a collection of educational materials provided in “Honey Bear’s Hotspot Bar & Lounge”—a replica of an imagined Black bar created in the back of the exhibition space. Enhanced by the background music of two looping filmworks created by Harris and shown on a television in the corner, the “bar”—which is named for Harris’s father—features what Hickey called a “simulated asbestos ceiling,” a thread of neon Christmas lights, Saints paraphernalia, and a collage of Harris’s own family photos.

“These are not just bars,” Harris emphasizes in program notes, in his 2020 New York Times story on the project, and over the phone with me. “They aren’t just places to gather and get drinks. They are the epicenter of cultural life and of these venerable traditions that we have in New Orleans. Be it the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs or the Black Masking Indians.”

After scribbling the idea of documenting these cultural institutions in a notebook, Harris forgot about them for a decade. “I thought I had an infinite amount of time,” he said.

In the years since Hurricane Katrina (the event which spurred Harris’s career in photojournalism), rising demand for property in New Orleans’ highest ground neighborhoods—often populated by majority Black working-class communities—have resulted in drastic demographic shifts throughout the city. According to a 2016 report by The Housing Authority of New Orleans, the historically Black neighborhoods of the Bywater, Tremé, St. Roch, and St. Claude are consistently becoming majority white; a 2020 report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition reported New Orleans as one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country.

[Read about how New Orleans Photographer Tina Freeman juxtaposes arial photographs of the wetlands with those of the arctic here.]

For generations, St. Bernard Avenue served as a host of watering holes for primarily Black residents of the Seventh Ward and the Tremé, with six Black-owned bars. Today, all of these institutions, save for two, are white-owned and -patronized. “And one might wonder,” noted Harris, “why would you get upset about these bars closing? But those bars shutter, those traditions get displaced, and it changes the landscape and fabric of a neighborhood. And that’s something really serious.”

“And one might wonder,” noted Harris, “why would you get upset about these bars closing? But those bars shutter, those traditions get displaced, and it changes the landscape and fabric of a neighborhood. And that’s something really serious.”

Since embarking on the project in 2018, two of the institutions Harris documented in New Orleans have already closed, after decades in business: Purple Rain Bar and The Sandpiper Lounge. Harris’s images—captured in the watering holes’ final years—reveal, plainly, exactly what we have lost: “Unc” sipping on a pint of Boone’s Farms with a bucket of ice at his elbow, a $20 bill in hand; three “Monday faithfuls” at the bar, one leaning all the way back in his chair; price lists and baby photos on the walls; girlfriends giggling in the corner.

But it’s even more than that. Purple Rain Bar is home to the Golden Blades Indians, who before its closure would dress there on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph’s Night. Today, its façade is painted pink, and it looks as though it will likely be turned into a residential building in the near future.

“Initially, this was about telling a story,” said Harris. “But since engaging in this project, I realized it was really about documenting these places, providing proof that they existed.” 

See Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges on exhibit at the Hilliard University Museum through July 30, 2022 and explore more of Harris’s work at lkasimuharris.com.