Through the Looking Glass

by

For PhotoNOLA, a book to be judged by its cover

New Orleans is not an ordinary town. So it stands to reason that Inventing Reality —a new anthology that highlights the work of twenty-seven photographers from the New Orleans area—should be no ordinary book. The new publication, which is released by LUNA Press to coincide with the PhotoNOLA festival of photography taking place this month, tells an arresting story about the identity of a city as immortalized by its photographers.

LUNA Press founder Josephine Sacabo commissioned the book as a fundraiser for PhotoNOLA, and asked D. Eric Bookhardt, art critic for New Orleans’ Gambit Weekly, to curate the collection. Bookhardt found it “serendipitous” when the call for submissions in April 2013 was answered overwhelmingly with surrealist images. “New Orleans is a pretty surreal place—you have all these bizarre influences woven in.”

The port city swells with history too. In the book’s introduction, Bookhardt points to two seminal figures in the field of photography: Jules Lion, the first African-American photographer, who opened a daguerreotype shop in New Orleans just one year after the technology was invented; and Clarence John Laughlin (1905—1985), raised in New Orleans and considered the country’s first surrealist photographer.

“Nobody was really doing dreamlike, fantastical multiple image work back then,” Bookhardt says of Laughlin. “He set the tone.”

The anthology provides photographers a venue for paying homage to their artistic ancestors, while also expanding the “visionary vocabulary” of the medium. Photographers range from the established, including Sacabo herself, 2013 Guggenheim Fellow Deborah Luster, and David Halliday, to younger emerging artists.

Manufactured by leading art reproduction printers ODDI of Reykjavik, Iceland, Inventing Reality is available from A Gallery For Fine Photography, Crescent City Books, Garden District Book Shop, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Octavia Books, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. LUNA Press will host a book launch for Inventing Reality in conjunction with PhotoNOLA 2013, a photography festival running December 12—15. The festival features workshops and lectures, as well as over fifty exhibits across the city.

Inventing Reality. 136 pages, 95 photographs. Softcover – Otobind, 8.5” x 11” portrait. Paper: 170 Gm Upm Finesse Plus Varnish. Cover: 4/4 Ink Foil Stamping. Published by Luna Press with a foreword by Russell Lord. Author and curator: D. Eric Bookhardt. $45. lunapress.com